American Oil and Gas Reporter - September 2018 - 106

ConventionSection: Eastern Kansas Oil & Gas Association

EKOGA Annual Meeting - Mayetta, KS
Tuesday, Oct. 2
9 a.m. Education Workshop Check-In, Prairie
Band Casino Convention Center
"Eastern Kansas Oil Field Essentials"
Chris McGown, Host
9:50 a.m. Opening Remarks
10-11:45 a.m. Education Session
"Waterflood Chemicals-An Eastern Kansas
Case Study," Innospec Inc.
"Developing an Active Waterflood-Cementing Considerations," Wes Ketcham,
Lakeshore Operating LLC; Cement Service Company
11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Lunch
12:30-3 p.m. Education Session
"Natural Gas Fundamentals," Johnnie Riley,
Hurricane Services Inc.; MV Pipelines/KPC
"Well Service Fundamentals." Javi Jimenez,
Hurricane Services Inc.
"Practical Logging," Wes Ketcham,
Lakeshore Operating LLC
3:15 p.m. EKOGA Board of Directors
Meeting

Wednesday, Oct.3
8 a.m. Registration, Prairie Band Casino
Convention Center
Registration Packets May be Picked Up
8 a.m. Trade Show Opens

itself funded such an undertaking.
"It was a significant benefit to our
members, to be able to have their voices
heard, and we made a difference pretty
quickly," he applauds.
The key point in his brief with which
the staff concurred, Brock says, is that a
defect in a public notice is not fatal to
the notice. "There is an abundance of
case law that says an error in a notice is
only an irregularity and has to be challenged through an appeals process," he
expounds. "But it does not invalidate the
proceeding. That is the argument staff
echoed in its filing.
"We also argued that because the
period in which to file a protest wasn't a
required element of the published notice,
that an error in gratuitous information
could not invalidate the notice," Brock
continues. "Staff didn't necessarily adopt
that argument, but it did concur that the
regulations don't require you to include
the time to protest the application within
the public notice."
As of early August, Brock says, EKOGA was awaiting a final ruling. He calls
the legal issue involved in the docket
fairly simple. "The real impact is the
number of applications affected. (Industry

10:30-11:45 a.m. 61st Annual Members
Meeting, Premier Lounge
Reports by Rob Eberhart, EKOGA President; David Bleakley, Environmental
Chairman; Tom Palace, Lobbyist; Warren
Martin, Kansas Strong; Ryan Hoffman
and Troy Russell, Kansas Corporation
Commission; Lynn Kent, Kansas Property
Valuation Division
Noon Lunch
3 p.m. Trade Show Closes
6 p.m. President's Reception & Social,
Prairie Band Casino Convention Center
7 p.m. Banquet
Followed by 23rd Annual Anything Goes
Auction
8:30 p.m. Welcome and Introduction of
Guest Speaker: Mark Mathis, Clean Energy Alliance

Thursday, Oct. 4
8-9 a.m. EKOGA Annual Golf Tournament
Check-In, Firekeeper Golf Course
9 a.m. Golf Tournament Shotgun Tee Off
18-hole, Men's and Women's Mixed FourPerson Scramble
Awards Immediately Following
11 a.m. Lunch, Firekeeper Golf Course

opponents) basically found a technical
defect, and tried to use that to invalidate
all those proceedings and force companies
to file new applications."
Wind Farms
An issue somewhat less simple to address is the encroachment of wind energy
into the eastern Kansas oil patch. A year
ago, EKOGA was concerned about interest
in developing a wind farm in Anderson
County that would have overlain a portion
of the Bushton Shoestring, which is one
of the primary fields in Anderson County,
according to EKOGA Director Chris McGown, owner of McGown Drilling Inc.
in Mound City, Ks.
The leases being proffered, he says,
were very restrictive toward other surface
uses and subordinated the mineral estate
to the wind lease.
Fortunately, McGown continues, a
couple large landowners in the area
became concerned and took some substantial acreage blocks off the table. After
that, interest in the wind project appeared
to dwindle.
But more recently, he advises, "A new
group has attempted to lease acreage in
west Linn County and into eastern An-

106 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

derson County. Again, a couple landowners
are trying to get ahead of this deal and
have taken a similar approach."
Bleakley also cites an Internet posting
that APEX Clean Energy out of Virginia
wants to build a 300 megawatt wind farm
in Neosho County as well as a 195 mw
project in southwest Bourbon and northwest Crawford counties.
From what he has seen, McGown
says, the latest permutation of wind
leases aren't as egregious as those being
pushed a year and a half ago in Anderson
County, but they still fall short of a
comfortable middle ground. "You probably can collect a wind farm royalty
check or collect an oil royalty check,
but it is going to be really hard to collect
both," he summarizes.
EKOGA's approach throughout, McGown says, has been to make landowners
aware of their options by educating its
own members who in turn can advise
landowners.
"We aren't taking out newspaper ads
or anything like that," he reflects. "But
we are trying to educate our operators,
who are having those conversations with
landowners. They have been fairly well
received."
Convention Plans
When EKOGA members gather at the
Prairie Band Casino Convention Center
north of Topeka, Ks., for their 2018
annual meeting, Eberhart says they will
represent an industry in recovery.
"We are a pretty resilient group and all
of us did everything we could to survive
the downturn, and most of us did," he expresses. "The supply houses don't seem to
be singing the blues when I walk in anymore,
and everybody is starting to do some drilling,
so I think the industry's health is good.
"We need this price somewhere north
of $60 to last long enough for us to drill
and complete some wells, and get our
production back up to pre-2014 levels,"
Eberhart continues. "But I think in general
we are doing real well. We have more
service companies interested in our annual
trade show than we have had for the past
several years."
A highlight of the meeting, announces
EKOGA Executive Director Tom Palace,
will be a keynote address by Clean Energy
Alliance founder Mark Mathis at the
Wednesday, Oct. 3, banquet.
Calling him "a pretty impressive individual," Palace says author and filmmaker Mathis has spent most of his

American Oil and Gas Reporter - September 2018

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