My neighbor has a pipeline on his property and the edge of the ROW is our property line. He uses it mostly as a road to get from one end of his place to another. The pipeline people saw that he was using this as a road and told him that he couldn't drive on it anymore. He took them to court and won. That was awhile ago. Last year they informed him that he needed to tap the line to run another line to the local town that already has a gas line from a different pipe. The mayor told him that the city is broke and cannot afford to run anything there. This is not for the city, but the pipeline people used the city to increase the size of the ROW to 100 x100 feet of surface area to build the gas tap. They offered him $10,000 and he took them to court and said that the final cost was $30,000 I have no idea if this is accurate, or what the lawyer cost him. He said that he would keep them tied up in court for years, but a month after talking to him, they started construction.
What he did learn about the pipeline is that it was needed to build a plant that converts plastic bags and bottles into oil that can be used to make gasoline. This is one of those Green Energy programs created under the Obama Administration to fight man made global warming. He wasn't able to find out how much money they are spending on this, but there is a time limit on how long the Federal money is available to build this plant. Having the natural gas from the pipeline was crucial to being able to do this. The plant is being built about 5 miles away, next to another natural gas pipeline that didn't have the high quality of natural gas that this one does. They took that land by the same Eminent Domain process, but I don't know any of the details. Just that it's several acres in size. They finished the gas tap and ran the new pipe line along the County Road last year and construction on the plant is still going on.
Just speculating based on what I've been told by my neighbor and the guys who work for the city where they get there natural gas, they all think this is just a big government funded money spending disaster that will close down as soon as they run out of Federal money to support it. What happens to all of it when that happens? Or what happens if it's successful and they decide to build more plants?
And to my point, if you have a pipe line on your property, you will never know what could happen in the future. There is no limit to what the Government will spend to waste money, or any restrictions on what they can take from you if they have a reason to do so. Whatever you think you have in a contract with them is only as good as the day when they decided they want something different. While this is true for every piece of land, having the pipeline on your land just makes it more likely.
For me, there is a bonus to this. Where they put the tap for the pipeline means that if they widen the road in front of my place, they would have to relocate that tap in order to take land away from me. There is a big study being done by the State of Texas right now with $5 million dollars set aside to study how to turn 2 lanes into 4 lanes for emergency evacuation during a natural disaster. There is also a big push to build a toll road in my area. The tap on the pipeline will make it very difficult for them to take the land on my side of the road.
