Most people who call us about Monroe County ask what an acre is worth. It is the wrong first question here. Monroe sits in the dry gas window of the Utica and Point Pleasant, and nearly everything that sets the value of an interest is measured in Mcf rather than dollars. The gas has no…
Owners in Sublette County, Wyoming expect one answer to what a royalty is worth there, because it is one county and the answer is always gas. It is not one answer. Sublette holds two gas accumulations with almost nothing to do with each other, and a royalty on one behaves nothing like a royalty on…
Mountrail County owners usually arrive at the same question from the same direction. The royalty checks used to matter. Now they are small, or they come some months and not others, and the obvious conclusion is that the interest is nearly worthless. Sometimes that is right. More often the owner is reading one number when…
Mail from Bossier Parish tends to start the same way. A royalty check came for a few years and then stopped, or a succession turned up a 1948 reservation nobody has thought about since. Underneath it is one question: do I still own anything, and what is it worth? In Louisiana the answer often turns…
If you own minerals in eastern Arapahoe County, you have probably heard that a large drilling program was approved out past Aurora and wondered what it does to the value of what you hold. An approved plan and a royalty check are separated by years and a sequence of administrative gates, and where your acreage…
A royalty check from a Grady County well arrives every month for years, and then one month it does not. No letter comes with the silence. The well is still making gas, but the money has stopped. In Oklahoma that almost always means the interest has gone into suspense, and the useful question is which…
Most Midland County royalty owners ask the same question in the same way: “I get about this much a month — what is that worth?” It is a reasonable question, and in a shallow conventional field it would be the right one. In Midland County it is close to the wrong one, because your current…
A royalty check reflects production, price and deductions all at once. When the number changes, most owners look at price first. In Wyoming in 2025, though, some of the biggest changes came from production itself, and the direction depended on the county. We added up the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission’s well-level production data…
Two North Dakota royalty owners can open their statements in the same month and see opposite trends. One, with acreage in Divide County, may be watching new wells get permitted a few miles away. Another, in Stark County, may be watching a check that gets a little smaller every year. Both own minerals in the…
Two owners in the same Sublette County gas unit compare check stubs and find that one is paid noticeably less per thousand cubic feet than the other. Same wells, same month, same gas. The difference is almost always in the deduction lines, and in Wyoming those lines are governed by a statute that is more…