Well, we've found our Kansas legislative bill this year that is likely to be a fight to the death over an issue that most of us don't know anything about.

The issue is migrating natural gas that is stored in underground caverns in the state.

It is a fight worth millions of dollars to big natural gas companies and worth smaller amounts to nearby property owners who are seeing that their prospects of selling mineral rights under their land shrink or maybe just become worthless.

Here's how it plays out: You are a giant natural gas company, and you store your natural gas in underground caverns, in naturally occurring voids thousands of feet below the land surface. To store it, you compress it both so you get more stored and to pressurize it so that it can be retrieved easily to be fed into pipelines that move it to customers in cities, in factories, nearly anywhere.

But, by compressing that natural gas underground, it tends to travel through rock formations underneath land that you don't own the mineral rights to. And, people with natural gas wells on adjoining property pump out your stored natural gas and sell it.

Hmmm ...

Something's not right here. The big storage companies really ought not over-pressurize their gas but the formations that hold their gas aren't perfectly sealed. There's really no way to prevent pressurized underground gas from migrating off your land. But, it's your gas, and you don't want people with the right to drill in hopes of finding their own gas taking yours.

At some point, it's like letting your cattle graze on someone else's pasture: You get the benefit of fat cattle; your neighbor just sees his/her grass disappear to no benefit.

The answer, for those pumping natural gas into storage fields, is to just expand those fields -- even if they extend underneath property that someone else owns, at some price, but at a cost that is lower than having your wandering natural gas pumped and sold by someone else.

The answer, if a natural gas storage field is spreading under your land, is relying on the "rule of capture," which means essentially that what's under your land becomes yours.

That's the world of natural gas. It migrates. It's not like cattle you can fence in or a dog on a leash.

Sound complicated? Sure is. There are lobbyists for the natural gas companies who assert that their clients' natural gas is being essentially stolen. There are less well-heeled landowners saying that the migrating gas is destroying their chance to profit from their drilling rights, essentially letting that migrating gas set new boundaries on their property.

It's all a long way from the pilot light on your hot water heater, isn't it?

We'll watch to see whether this is an issue that the Legislature can settle.

Sounds iffy, doesn't it?

Syndicated by Hawver News Co. of Topeka, Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver's Capitol Report. To learn more about this statewide political news service, visit www.hawvernews.com.