In the 2026 governor’s race, much has been said about Eric Barlow’s supposed opposition to fossil fuels. Those statements are untrue. I know because I lived through, and took part in, the split estates debate when it happened.
A little background is in order. In the late 1990s, two oilmen, Martens and Peck, figured out how to produce methane from coal seams commercially. Before that, coalbed methane was a nuisance, the gas that made water wells explosive.
Their work set off a methane boom across the Powder River Basin.
Almost overnight, land over the coal seams became a commercial asset to be leased and drilled.
Then came the roads, the wells, the reservoirs for produced water, the gathering lines, the power lines, the big transmission pipelines and the compressor stations.
All of it went in, on almost every spacing unit parcel, across the basin.
Ranchers watched their pastures turn into industrial sites.
Today’s fights over wind turbines, gravel pits and data centers are often about stopping a project.
Back then, the ranchers said something different: “Hey, wait a minute. You are tearing up our ranches with roads, pipelines, well sites and compressors. Isn’t there a way we can have a say on what happens on our ranches be paid for the damage?”
Eric Barlow was one of those ranchers.
Unlike many environmental organizations, Barlow did not want to stop development.
He wanted notice before it happened, a say in how it was done, and fair pay for the grass and the inconvenience of wells and roads scattered across his ranch.
Imagine waking up on the family ranch to find, without any warning, a bulldozer building a drilling pad in the middle of your prime hay field.
The problem was one of split estates.
A landowner who owned both the surface and the minerals underneath controlled development on his land. If he didn’t want drilling, he didn’t lease the minerals.
But when the minerals had been severed from the surface, so that one person owned the minerals and another owned the surface, there was trouble.
Wyoming law said the mineral estate was dominant.
The mineral owner could use as much of the surface as was reasonably necessary to develop the minerals, and the surface owner had little recourse.
Wyoming had already solved this problem for coal.
State law requires coal operators to post a bond covering the surface, crops, forage, improvements and disruption of the landowner’s operation. Oil and gas had no such requirement.
So, ranchers lived with the daily disruption, while operators and royalty owners, many from out of state, collected the profits.
Landowners had little protection, and lawsuits were too expensive and too slow to help.
Some operators simply did not want the expense and bother of working things out with the people whose land they were using.
The Legislature took up the issue in 2003. A bill died in committee that year, and another failed to be introduced in 2004.
After the 2004 failure, the Legislature and the governor set up an 11-member split estates committee of legislators, oil and gas representatives, environmentalists and ranchers.
That committee wrote a compromise bill for the 2005 session.
I was elected to the House in 2004, and Eric Barlow was one of my vocal constituents.
What Barlow was really concerned about was protection of private property rights.
Barlow was not the only constituent who called. Another one, who called me often, owned an oil company. I listened to both.
Never once did Barlow tell me he opposed oil and gas development. Let that sink in.
Some of the environmental groups involved were a different story, and Barlow has been unfairly lumped in with them.
I wasn’t on the 2004 committee, but its bill came to the 2005 House Judiciary Committee, where I served.
At the end of our hearing, I said I wanted to make some changes, because I didn’t think the protections would work.
As soon as the meeting ended, I was surrounded by oil and gas, agriculture and environmental lobbyists, all with the same message: no precocious freshman legislator should tinker with a carefully crafted compromise.
I voted the bill out of committee. But on the House floor, I voted no.
The bill passed 52 to 6 and became law.
Few people would call me anything but an advocate for the fossil fuel industry.
I still didn’t believe the bill’s protections were strong enough to safeguard ranchers’ property.
Things worked out reasonably well after that, and the minimum bond has since been raised.
The coalbed methane play had largely run its course by 2010.
Barlow’s family ranch still has a power plant, power lines, a compressor station, pipelines and some oil wells on it.
The industrial sites coexist peacefully with sheep, cattle and yaks.
Living through the split estates debate, I learned that Barlow was never against fossil fuel development.
As a surface owner, all he wanted was a say in what happened on his ranch and compensation for his losses.
And who could blame him?
Tom Lubnau served in the Wyoming Legislature from 2004 to 2015 and is a former Speaker of the House. He can be reached at: YourInputAppreciated@gmail.com
