Could Landowners End Up On the Hook For Drilling Cleanups?

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From the Ohio Environmental Law Review:
So you’ve signed on the dotted line to finalize an oil and gas lease, and now the trucks are rolling in and the drilling rig is being set up right there on your land. You hear all the machines humming and see workers connecting hoses to some of trucks lined up on the pad. For the first time, you realize just how much goes into drilling in the Marcellus shale. You start to wonder: what will happen if something goes wrong? Could you be left holding the bag for the cleanup of environmental contamination?
It turns out that you could. Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (“CERCLA”, also known as “Superfund”) in 1980 to help clean up sites that have been contaminated with hazardous substances. The government can clean the contaminated sites and then use CERCLA to force the parties responsible for the contamination to pay back the costs.
Read this entire posting here. 

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