newjerseynewsroom.com

BY BOB KINKEAD

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Kansas is where they grow wheat, right?  Or is it corn?

It’s kind of a flat place, famous mostly for a twister that picked up Dorothy and Toto and set them down in Oz.

So, it comes as a surprise to us East-coasters that the farmers of Kansas are in the middle of an oil boom, bringing up black gold from underneath the prairie.

According to CNN Money,  farmers from the oily parts of the Sunflower State are being offered upwards of $1,000 per acre for drilling rights, plus royalties for the oil produced.

A look at Wikipedia reveals that Kansas is the northern outpost of the mid-continent oil province, a swath of oil fields that covers large parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. 

Texas, of course,  has produced the most oil – ranked first in the Mid-Continent with almost five billion barrels of proven reserves.  Kansas, meanwhile, is estimated to have a mere 428 million barrels. 

However, even though its reserves are modest by comparison, some of Kansas’ farmers are harvesting  significant windfalls.    Jack Gates, a 64-year-old wheat farmer from Harper County, received $160,000 for rights to drill his 160 acres, and John Walker, from the small town of Anthony, has received $1.5 million over the past year for rights to his 2,000 acre spread.

One reason that  Kansas may be a late-bloomer in Mid-Continent oil production may be the development over recent years of horizontal drilling techniques and the increased use of a variety of techniques to reach more oil than is available with an old fashioned vertical well.

Oil and gas drilling has been conducted throughout the Mid-Continent area since the late 1800s. Historically large strikes over the past century have included oil fields with such colorful names as Wild Mary Sudik, Spindletop, Smackover, Caddo Pine Island and Bull Bayou. Most of these fields have been thoroughly exploited and have little reserves remaining.

In Kansas, however, even when the oil is gone the cash may keep rolling in. It seems that energy companies are also interested in the wind that comes  whipping down the plains. In addition to buying drilling rights, some companies are also paying Kansas farmers for rights to build wind turbines to generate electricity. Leon Zoglman, a 64-year-old farmer, said that oil giant BP, well-known for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010,  has negotiated to build 12 turbines on his land and he expects about $700 a month royalties for each one when they begin producing.

Long famous for tornados, a modern-day Dorothy may soon find Kansas celebrated for windfalls as well.