Through his previously undisclosed ownership of the 82,000-acre Diamond Cross ranch, Mars is bringing his fortune to bear on the side of ranchers and conservationists trying to curb the companies' ambitions. Mars is worth an estimated $14 billion.
“The perception that it's the big guy (energy companies) versus the little guy (ranchers) – in this instance, that's not the case,” said Bruce Williams, vice president of Fidelity Exploration and Production, a defendant in one of several lawsuits brought by Diamond Cross over natural gas drilling.
The Mars family has a long-standing reputation for secrecy, and Forrest Mars' name is not listed as a party in any of the lawsuits pitting Diamond Cross against coal and natural gas developers. His ownership in the ranch was revealed in a Dec. 28 court affidavit reviewed by The Associated Press.
Mars did not respond to requests for interviews made through his son-in-law, Lonnie Wright, and through Diamond Cross attorney Loren O'Toole.
O'Toole said Mars' opposition to energy development stemmed from the vast amounts of water such projects can consume. In the arid West, water is essential to keeping working cattle ranches such as Diamond Cross alive.
The ranch sits on the northern end of the Powder River Basin, an area with some of the most productive coal and natural gas fields in the nation. Development of those resources was concentrated over the last decade in the southern portion of the basin, in Wyoming.
However, in recent years, exploration began pushing north into Montana. And Mars' ranch soon began to push back, with lawsuits against the companies involved.
Yet despite his hefty legal and financial resources, Mars' influence on the rolling plains of southeastern Montana could be put to the test by state and federal laws favoring oil and gas development.
Under a property regime known as split estates, landowners in many Western states do not necessarily control the minerals beneath their property. In the Diamond Cross case, Fidelity and another company, Pinnacle Gas Resources, have oil and gas leases on the ranch that predate Mars' ownership, according to public records and company officials.
State law gives the companies the right to enter Mars' land to drill on those leases. So far, however, he's held them at bay.
“Forrest has a lot of money, but he's in the same boat as anybody else,” said Beth Kaeding, chairwoman of the Northern Plains Resource Council, a conservation group of which Mars is a member.Mars Inc. – maker of Snickers, the Mars bar, M&Ms and a variety of other food products – is one of the country's largest family-held companies, with an estimated 40,000 employees and $21 billion in annual revenues. Forrest Mars and two siblings, John and Jacqueline, each ranked among the top-20 richest Americans in 2007, according to Forbes Magazine's annual list of the wealthy.
“If you don't own the mineral rights, it doesn't matter how huge your ranch is, how politically powerful you are, how much money you have,” Kaeding said. “Mineral rights trump surface rights.”
Forrest Mars, who is in his 70s, is no longer chief executive but still contributes to the company, company spokeswoman Bertille Glass said.
Public records show the billionaire, who reportedly also has a residence in McLean, Va., began to amass property in southeastern Montana as early as 2003 – just as natural gas production in the area was booming.
Since then, Mars has launched or joined multiple court fights through Diamond Cross. The suits have challenged the industry's depletion of water reserves, a proposal to build a new coal railroad through the ranch and, most recently, efforts to drill on Diamond Cross itself.
Diamond Cross controls more than 82,000 acres in Rosebud and Bighorn counties – equivalent to roughly 130 square miles, public records show. The court affidavit lists Mars, his wife Deborah, daughter Pamela and son-in-law Wright as the co-owners of Diamond Cross Properties. Its headquarters are across the border in Wyoming, where Mars keeps a permanent residence, according to the affidavit.
Ranch manager Denise Wood said Mars had kept the Montana property as a working cattle ranch and that all its employees were “native Montanans.” She said his concerns about energy development mirrored those of many longtime residents, particularly the practice of pumping out underground water reserves to access trapped pockets of natural gas.
Those reserves are depended on by farmers and ranchers to water their fields and livestock. Energy companies sometimes capture the water and hold it in stock ponds that ranchers can use, but often it is lost as runoff. Mars attorney O'Toole said the lawsuits were not meant to “at any cost block development.” “That's not the point,” he said. “The point is, we can't lose all that water and at the same time have no provision to put it back.”
In the most recent legal case involving Diamond Cross, Wyoming-based Pinnacle Gas Resources is attempting to begin drilling on a lease it holds to more than 10,000 acres of Mars property.
When the company notified Diamond Cross last month that it planned to begin drilling on the ranch by early January, O'Toole responded with a letter barring Pinnacle employees from the ranch. If they came on the property, O'Toole wrote, Pinnacle would be “nothing more than a trespasser” attempting to “breach the peace.” Pinnacle sued, demanding access. The first hearing in the case is scheduled Tuesday, in state district court. Attorneys and a state official in charge of oil and gas development said they could not recall a similar situation over the last two decades where a landowner had to be sued for access to valid leases.
“As a lawyer it should come down to the facts and the law, but there's no denying that money talks,” said Pinnacle attorney Chris Mangen.
A Mars victory would mark “a significant change in the interpretation of state law that says you do have access,” said Tom Richmond, administrator for the Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation. That agency is a defendant in a separate Diamond Cross lawsuit, over its approval of some of Pinnacle's drilling plans.
Richmond offered another solution to the dispute: Pointing to the gas company's size – its stock is worth about 1 percent of Mars' estimated personal fortune – he suggested the billionaire could simply buy the publicly traded company if he was determined to keep it off his land.
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