If you signed a Utica lease with Chesapeake in Carroll County in 2011 or 2012 and your tract produces, you have likely been paid by three different companies without ever signing a new agreement. Chesapeake sent the first checks. Then EAP Ohio. Now EOG. What your interest is worth turns on three things pulling in…
A Caddo Parish family asked us why one company offered on all of their minerals north of Oil City, while a second, weeks later, wanted only the rights below 6,000 feet. Both offers were genuine. They were not offers on the same thing. Caddo Parish is unusual even for north Louisiana. Two producing systems sit…
If you own a royalty interest in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, there is a fair chance the wells paying you were drilled before you were born. That is not a weakness to apologize for — it is the most important fact about what your interest is worth. Valuing a mature San Juan Basin interest…
A Greene County family finds a deed from 1902 in which a great-grandfather sold “all the coal and other minerals” under the farm, and reasonably concludes there is nothing left to own. Very often that conclusion is wrong. Under Pennsylvania law the word minerals in an old deed usually did not carry the oil and…
Most people who ask who owns the mineral rights to my property expect a records problem: find the old deed, follow the names, done. In Ohio it is not only that. Two separate statutes can take a severed mineral interest from the family that owns it and hand it to whoever owns the surface. Neither…
Two families in Doddridge County can hold the same net royalty acres under the same Antero unit and get very different offers. Neither is being cheated. The gap comes down to two things: how much of their gas is liquids rather than methane, and what their lease says about who pays to turn those liquids…
Two neighbors in DeSoto Parish can own the same acreage, be leased at the same royalty fraction, sit under the same Haynesville well — and open very different checks. That is usually not an accounting error, and usually not a deduction problem either. It is the unit. In Louisiana you are not paid on your…
If you own mineral rights in New Mexico’s Permian Basin region, the first question is usually: what are they actually worth? Unlike a lot of the country, New Mexico’s answer often comes with genuinely large numbers attached — but the range is wide, and knowing where your interest falls in it depends on a specific…
If you own mineral rights in Louisiana’s Haynesville Shale region, the first question is usually the same one Ohio and Pennsylvania owners ask: what are they actually worth? The honest answer is still “it depends” — but in Louisiana, that answer depends on a few things that don’t apply anywhere else in the country, because…
Royalty statements can be genuinely confusing, especially if you inherited your mineral interest or have only recently started receiving payments. Here’s a plain-English breakdown of what you’re actually looking at. Decimal Interest This is the fraction of well production you’re entitled to, based on your ownership share and the lease royalty rate. It’s usually a…