Company offers to broker drilling leases for Poland

January 4, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

POLAND

Village-council members are mulling over an offer to allow a local company to negotiate a lease with an oil- and natural-gas- drilling company.

Atty. Damian P. DeGenova and Jaime Garayua, who founded Youngstown-based Sulmona Energy LLC, addressed council Tuesday. DeGenova, who served as village solicitor for eight years, told council he would lump the village-owned property, about 300 acres, with private land in the village and surrounding communities.

“The agreement would be for us to bargain for your land. ... We have almost 10,000 acres total,” he said, adding that such a large sum would give the landowners more leverage.

DeGenova stressed he would be bargaining with companies to create fracking wells — not injection wells, which have been linked by some critics to recent earthquakes.

Fracking is a process in which water, chemicals and sand are blasted into rocks thousands of feet below the ground to unlock natural gas and oil. That brine-water mix is then disposed of in injection wells.

DeGenova said the lease would stipulate the company pays for water testing and that no pipes, drilling or trucking would take place in the 265-acre Poland Municipal Forest, which makes up the majority of the village’s land holdings.

He said the most promising site for a fracking well appears to be off Western Reserve Road in Springfield Township. The horizontal drilling could extend under the village-owned land.

If council does not like the lease DeGenova’s company negotiates, it could send the contract back to renegotiate it or simply refuse to approve the contract, DeGenova said.

Council members said they would consult the Forest Board, which meets Jan. 26, and would have an answer by Feb. 7.