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Only a pipeline utility company can use eminent domain. A private oil and gas company cannot do that, they are bound by the terms of their lease. If you are a surface owner and not a mineral owner, you cannot "reasonably withhold" their right to those minerals. Settle that issue with the mineral owner. What percentage of landowners have eminent domain happen to them? Decimal dust.
The problem with using the word billions is that people just see dollar signs that arent there. Pipelines running across a your strip of property where they make "billions of dollars" are very rare. Please prove me wrong by estimating the volume of hydrocarbons it would take across your strip of land using only the transportation fee.
Most companies are reasonable and try to work with the landowner. They typically try to run along a road of some other out of the way location. I don't know of a single company that's in the business of trying to hose down a landowner. It either makes economic send to run across a landowner or it doesnt. Obviously in your line of business, it's in your best interest to scare landowners and offer to negotiate on their behalf when most of the time you make the matter more complicated than it is and often will cost them more.
Oh and ROW units for pipelines have been in rods nearly since oil was measured in bbls...there's no attempt to be fraudulent.
Not being a landowner, this seems to be a very oversimplified and partially incorrect assessment.
For example, the Keystone Pipeline is a private carrier, but has already enacted eminent domain on several landowners.
I'm not stating that oil companies are big evil, but they aren't cuddly teddy bears either - it's well documented that coercion and the fact that they have deeper pockets than your typical landowner has been used at times in the past. It is probably very uncommon, but not unheard of.
And make no mistake about it - oil companies make beaucoup money with the oil and gas that runs through those pipelines across private property. Without consent of private property owners and government backing via legislation that allows them eminent domain on land where the landowner does not want the pipeline, that product would be considerably more expensive to obtain. A landowner wanting a fair price to enable a company to make large sums of money is not selfish or wrong.
And the idea of "well, it's for the public good" is a double edged sword. That was the entire basis of government for the USSR, and is the entire corner stone of taxes that we all hate. There really should be a very defined and limited set of conditions where "for the public good" can be used.