One of our company offices is in Detroit Lakes, MN, very close to the ND border. The fact of the matter is that this oil boom has made many, many ND farmers instant millionaires. If oils is found on their land they are receiving huge royalty checks ($500k+ per month).
It is true that mineral rights are often not included in the sale of real estate in this part of the country...but the royalty checks they receive for allowing the oil companies to drill create generational wealth.
Generally, there are set-back limits to how close to existing building they're allowed to drill, in your mineral rights lease.
We just signed one last year with 750' setback. Luckily, it looks like they're going to drill on some adjacent land.
And, as someone else points out, it doesn't really matter where the pad goes (roughly), as they're covering either 640 or 1280 acres (1 or 2 square miles) with 6-8 horizontal legs from a single well pad, at least in this area of Ohio.
Yes they'd pay for the barn, but given directional drilling technology it's almost impossible that they'd have to do that the "holes" can be angled in from sometimes as far away as a few miles. IF they HAD to do it some guy in houston with a spreadsheet would plug in the barns cost and say drill/no drill in a few minutes. Hell, they might have a APP for that.
