My sisters and I have been receiving royalty checks for mineral rights in Caddo County from NE/4, Section 33, T10N, R10W and SW/4, Section 23, T10N, R11W. Before my mother passed, she was receiving the checks for these same 2 tracts. How can I find the original lease? I would like to know how old it is, who signed it and what the terms were?
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Contact the division order department for the operator that is sending you the checks right now and ask them for a copy. The original is filed at the Caddo County courthouse. You may have to all the courthouse to see how to get a copy if the operator does not have it.
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Ok, will do. Thank you very much!
When you contact them, tell them your names, your owner ID number, who you inherited from.
Ok, thank you. I will do that.
If the OGL is within the last 40 years, then you should be able to find it online at the Clerk’s office. If before that, then I have had some luck with getting a local law office to look up a document for a modest fee.
Thank you James, I have a feeling it’s pretty old.
Does this advise apply to NRI owners as well? Thanks
Hi Mrs. Barnes. Your writing is so helpful. I have every lease my immediate family has signed since the early 1950’s. That one lease still holds production yet today as that one very old well is still connected to the pipeline producing almost nothing. However when I have helped my extended family break leases because of Shut-in”s, “Non Production in the Lease” I have had what I’ll call terrible luck with Production Companies (at least admitting) they have copies of the lease. We have used amendments (now three pages long) to our leases since the mid 1960’s, and Production Companies most often iqnore those ammendments. As you know, Class Auction Law Suits are common over this. My question to you is it common for production companies the purchase wells to get copies of the leases for the wells. Do they ever look at the terms of individual leases on wells they purchase? On the last lease I broke located in Grady County OK, for our many family members that each have their own lease, using an attorney, an extremely large production company did release to all family members based on my one lease. Where I have had good luck in having skilled individuals find onwnership of mineral acres based mostly on deed and probate, it has been far more expensive to find old leases, some very old, in the four Oklahoma Court Houses in which our (extended) family has mineral acres. We all learn so much from your writing, but breaking leases based on non production / Shut-in or enforcing Ammendments to leases is getting more and more often. Any insight you could write about this subject would be helpful. Thank you so very much.
I will leave the breaking leases part to the attorneys. It can be challenging. I do iterate your point about keeping copies of every lease that you sign and add that every lease should be filed in the county courthouse and it might be worth it for each generation to check and make sure that you have copies of all active leases. Especially important for leases that have extra clauses that protect a mineral owner.
Wells get sold all the time and along the way, the original operator had the lease, but it may be lost as operators change or may be stored in a dark dungeon somewhere with inadequate documentation.
One can check the county courthouses on line up to a certain point, but past that, one must go to the courthouse and find it and make a copy. Or some courthouses may allow a picture scan that you can convert to a pdf.
Lets define terms. When one receives revenue, it is based on the net revenue interest (NRI) of each owner. The NRI is that eight decimal number on your check, something like .00538721. That is the nri. Now for most people on this forum, they have the NRI because they are mineral owners. If they are mineral owners, then their lease would be recorded in the County Clerk’s records.
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