Mitch Carmichael is the President of the West Virginia State Senate, and the Senator for WV Senate District 4, which covers the counties of Mason and Jackson as well as parts of Roane and Putnam. Carmichael took $9,000 from oil and gas interests in his last election. He voted in 2017 in favor of SB 576 and also joined with Craig Blair in sponsoring SB 244.

SB 576

West Virginia SB 576, introduced toward the end of the 2017 session, was the latest in a series of Forced Pooling bills aimed at allowing large gas companies to take mineral rights from private owners without their consent. A slightly watered-down version of earlier SB 244, it contained two especially threatening provisions to West Virginia’s citizens.

One was called “lease integration” by the authors, but dubbed “invisible ink” by many of the citizens’ rights groups fighting it. This provision would have allowed gas companies to forcibly pool old leases that were written before the age of pooling into a single drilling unit at the lowest possible rate allowed by law, well below what modern contracts often offer, all without the owners’ consent.

The second provision was the latest rebranding of Forced Pooling, now labeled under the name “Co-Tenancy”. This would have allowed minority owners of minerals, even the minerals under their own land, to be forced to allow extraction of those minerals if the other owners agreed. It would have allowed the government to directly force West Virginia citizens to sell their property to gas companies who wanted to develop it.