By CATHY DYSON

A Texas-based company is trying to lease 100,000 acres in the Fredericksburg region to drill for oil and gas.
Shore Exploration and Production Corp. is paying landowners in Caroline, Essex, King George and Westmoreland counties a one-time rental fee of $15 per acre for the chance to get on their property and dig for natural resources.
“The real money is if we find oil and gas,” said Stan Sherrill, the company’s land manager.
 Landowners would get an eighth of whatever is found, a standard royalty in the oil industry. Also, landowners would allow the company to set up rigs, tanks and storage units and build whatever roads are necessary, according to the leases.
“Shucks, who knows, we may hit the jackpot,” said Hubert Roberson, a Stafford County resident who leased 407 acres he owns in King George. “I just signed up like a pile of other people have.”
Sherrill and his co-workers are familiar with the Fredericksburg area. They came here from Texas in the mid-1980s for the same purpose: to lease land for drilling.
Data they gathered then revealed traces of oil and natural gas. Sherrill’s company decided it was time for another look.
“There is definitely something down there,” Sherrill said. “Is there something in commercial quantities? We don’t know. The only way to know is to drill.”
Woody Hynson, chairman of the Westmoreland Board of Supervisors, leased his 208 acres to the company. He believes there’s “an abundance of natural gas underneath of us, not oil,” and other county officials and residents have said the same.
“They did not find oil,” said Jack Green, director of the Community Development  Office in King George, about Shore Exploration’s earlier discoveries, “but found a large supply of natural gas.”
Sherrill stresses that his company will search for both.
NOT A ‘BARN BURNER’
Shore Exploration is a Virginia corporation with executive offices in Dallas. More than 20 years ago, it leased about 250,000 acres in what is known as the Taylorsville Basin, a formation that stretches from Hanover County into Maryland.
The basin was formed about 227 million years ago, and is almost entirely buried beneath Atlantic coastal plain sediments in Virginia and Maryland, said Katie Hernon, a geologist with the Virginia Department of Mines, Mineral and Energy.
“It attracted considerable industry interest in the 1980s,” Hernon said.
According to a state report, oil companies drilled 12 wells:  four in Westmoreland, two each in Caroline, King George and Essex, and one each in King William and Henrico counties.
Three wells drilled by Shore Exploration—in Colonial Beach, in the Ninde area of King George and in Caroline—found “traces of natural gas and a little oil in Caroline,” Sherrill said.
Shore Exploration had partnered with Exxon and Texaco, and stories published in The Free Lance–Star in 1989 showed the companies with their big rigs working the area.
They later pulled out for several reasons, Sherrill said.
Oil prices, which had been $35 a barrel,  dropped to $8 a barrel in the 1990s. Budgets were cut, and not even major players could keep throwing money down a hole.
“There was nothing they found in these areas that was a barn burner,” Sherrill said.
But obviously, something under the ground has beckoned the Texas land manager back to Virginia. He and three other landmen the business card says landman, so that’s why I did landmen as one word. cdrented an office in Bowling Green in spring 2010 and started contacting landowners about leasing their property.
LEASES LAST SEVEN YEARS
This time around, Shore Exploration is narrowing its focus to a smaller area. The company already has acquired leases on 60,000 acres, Sherrill said. Not all of the leases have been recorded in county courthouses yet because company representatives tend to file them in batches.
Shore Exploration hopes to lease about 80,000 acres of private land and up to 20,000 acres of federal government property, if allowed to drill on Fort A.P. Hill, Sherrill said.
The western boundary of the area being leased runs roughly along U.S. 301, he said.
The leases are for farms and lots of all sizes. The biggest is Ingleside Plantation Nurseries in Westmoreland, which signed up 2,650 acres. The smallest is a 2-acre parcel in Caroline.
The company typically doesn’t pursue small tracts, but acquired the 2-acre piece at the request of a relative who leased a larger portion of land, Sherrill said.
Almost all the leases are for seven years. A handful of people, who signed for five-year leases, got a one-time rental fee of $10 an acre, Sherrill said.
The biggest chunk of land is in Caroline, Sherrill said.
“A lot of people around here did sign up,” said C. Wayne Beazley of Sparta in Caroline, who leased 1,088 acres. “I thought the benefit was you got a little something for the property now, and if there is oil down there, well, I’d hope they’d come on and get started.”
Beazley’s wife, Maxine, was disappointed that Shore Exploration didn’t provide more information.
“We asked all kinds of questions—when, how, who, what—and we got no answers to any of them,” she said. “It was sort of evasive.”
Sherrill said landmen don’t know at this point when drilling might start or how deep wells will go. Little is known about the Taylorsville Basin because there hasn’t been any exploration beyond what was done in 1989. Sherrill said wells drilled then were “plugged and abandoned” before they might have become productive.
“A lot of time the answers are vague, not because you want to be vague but because you don’t have the answers,” Sherrill said.
THE NEXT STEPS
One thing is for sure; Nothing is likely to happen overnight.
After Shore Exploration gets all its leases, it will look for partners to help cover the cost of drilling. Sherrill hopes to start drilling within two or three years and have productive wells within six or seven years.
He says he doesn’t know what kind of drilling might be needed until things get started. It may include the controversial method of fracking, which fractures rock to release natural gas—but also can release chemicals into groundwater and the air.
Several of those who leased property wondered if they’ll be alive to reap any benefits, if there are natural resources under them.
“It’s taken 20 years to get this far, and if it takes 20 years to get to the next step, I might not be here,” said Hynson in Westmoreland.
He also said it would be a lot easier to get oil out of the area rather than natural gas.
Oil could be shipped by barge or truck, but natural gas would require the construction of a multimillion-dollar  pipeline.
“Nobody’s gonna want that through their neighborhood,” he said.
Plus, more landowners would be affected by the drilling because the wells have to be bigger. Companies need 40 acres for an oil well, 640 acres for a gas well, Sherrill said.
“Oil does not move through the reservoir rocks nearly as freely as natural gas,” said Michael Abbott, public relations manager at the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy.
Sherrill also said multiple wells would have to yield ample supplies of natural gas to justify the cost of the required infrastructure.
“We’re going to have to find a lot of gas before we build a pipeline,” he said.
Cathy Dyson:   540/374-5425
cdyson@freelancestar.com