Karen Sherrill is a widow who lives alone in a nice modular home park in Orcutt. She recently retired from a job with a local travel company. And like a number of people, she supplements her income with money she receives from a local oil company which leases her mineral rights.
Because she relies so much on her lease checks from Greka Energy, she’s concerned about Measure P and how it could affect her income. The voter-driven initiative to ban oil extraction methods of hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, cyclic steaming and well acidization in Santa Barbara County is on the November ballot.
A group called the Santa Barbara County Water Guardians formed earlier this year specifically to gather enough signatures to put the controversial measure on the ballot. The group’s stated aim is to protect the county’s air and water from pollution it says is caused by such enhanced oil extraction methods.
A bigger picture
Sherrill said recently, in an interview at her home, that when people go to the polls she hopes they know that there’s more at stake than just the future of big oil companies.
“It starts with us, just common people. I’m 78 years old and a widow. I can’t live on Social Security. I need our lease money to survive,” said Sherrill, whose husband Frederick Sherrill died in 1996.
Frederick’s lineage traces back to some of the Santa Maria Valley’s pioneering families, and his great grandmother, Grace Thornburgh Adam, owned property now farmed by Driscoll Berries. But when the family parted ways with the surface property, it maintained the mineral rights to the land.
Ed Hazard has a similar story. His family owns the mineral rights to 248 acres near Garey, southeast of Santa Maria, which PetroRock LLC is seeking to tap. The company’s North Garey project is in the Cat Canyon oil field and Hazard’s family owns the mineral rights to land where 12 of the wells are proposed to be located.
He said the field, previously operated by Texaco, has been idle since 1990. The recent interest in reopening old fields got him involved with the National Association of Royalty Owners, an organization with 10 chapters covering 17 states. The newest is in California which Hazard serves as president and director.
Click here to read the article at Lompoc Record.