Oil exploration Know your rights

While oil and gas exploration has reached record levels, Federated Farmers can assist landowners with a new fact sheet on obligations, rights and rules. Photo / Thinkstock

Controversy over oil and gas exploration is regularly hitting the headlines as the Government continues to open up off and onshore areas for exploration permits through the Block Offer process.

Since the release in 2009 of Government's Petroleum Action Plan, spending on the hunt for oil and gas has reached record levels.

Media attention has primarily focused on controversy around the perceived environmental impacts of offshore drilling, while onshore extraction technologies such as fracking have received air time for their potential impacts on groundwater quality.

An underlying story about which less is understood is the access to private land required as part of the onshore exploration process.

If the 2014 Block Offer -- which opens up new permit areas on the east and West Coast -- is anything to go by access for exploration will become an issue for farmers outside the traditional areas in Taranaki in the near future.

Access to private land for petroleum exploration is governed by the Crown Minerals Act 1991 (CMA), which grants a permit holder right of access under certain conditions. Access rights are related to the intensity of intended activity on the land and divided into minimum and non-minimum categories.

A landowner's experience of exploration activity will begin at the minimum. This level of activity generally means a low impact walk around of a property, with any sampling done by hand. The legislation puts specific limitations on access for this purpose and requires that the permit holder either get the landowner's permission to come on to the property, or provide at least 10 days written notice of their intentions.

Protections that are afforded in the CMA include a logical restriction to daylight hours and specific prevention of access among other things to covenanted land, and land under crop or near stockyards, without the specific consent of the landowner.

Unlike the Electricity Act however, the CMA does not offer the landowner the right to delay access or set reasonable conditions on timing, and as such the private landowner is very much dependent on a best practice approach from the exploration company concerned.

Exploration companies maintain that they place a big emphasis on community relations, as Todd Energy outlined in their submission to the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment on fracking: "Gaining and maintaining community understanding, trust and acceptance is integral to good business practice."

These are good sentiments but, to help provide certainty for landowners Federated Farmers, has produced a fact sheet on the rules, rights and obligations around access for minimum impact exploratory activity, on the back of our experience with access issues in a number of areas.

If you are in this situation and are a Federation member you can obtain a copy by calling 0800 327 646.