Haynesville Shale: warning from a friend

Central Louisiana has some great bloggers that I really enjoy.
The newest of those is Alexcenla’s Rants and Ravings. This blogger has been keeping an eye on the Haynesville Shale and emailed me about some of his experience with Oil & Gas companies. I asked him to do a guest blog sharing that experience, and he agreed to do so.

From Alexcenla:
I have noticed with great interest the excitement with the Haynesville Shale. I feel I have to warn some of the people that are benefitting from this. I own a considerable amount of land in New Roads, La. along with a number of other family members. When oil and gas was discovered in the Moore-Sams field there in the early 80's everyone in that area was (in their opinion) overnight millionaires.
Lease money and royalty monies flowed like beer out of an unending tap at first. Then mistakes were discovered in disbursement. I went to my mail box one afternoon to find a $40,000 check. Afterwards I received others not as large. Then payments settled down to around $500 or so a month. The company that was involved in the site then sent me a registered letter demanding repayment of over $50,000 in overpayments.
This happened to a large number of people. I did not pay it back, thank goodness by law I did not have to and they were not going to sue that many people for their mistake.
Long story short, this is a common occurrence. These fields can come on strong but get lost in the oil company's shuffling and bookkeeping. The sad part is you can’t prove their "mismanagement".
A lot of people in the New Roads area went deeply into debt and were unable to meet their obligations; the obvious happened. So to those newly rich, use extreme caution. Those gas and oil companies can bite you later on. My royalty checks today average $100 to $175 per month, sometimes less.
I notice that the Companies up there are already discovering mistakes they have made.
Beware.