Mineral Leasing Questions

West Virginia Mineral Rights
1

Hello, my husband and I are new to all this, and I’m looking for a little advice, which, in hindsight, perhaps we should have done 5 years ago.

So, back in June 2014, my husband Shawn signed a 5-year lease with Antero Resources. He owns a little over 1.5 net acres in Harrison County, West Virginia. Flash forward to now, May 2019. We literally a week ago received our district order paperwork. We sent it back a week ago today. We sent our direct deposit information and supposedly have 3 back checks, but have seen no royalties. It took them almost 5 whole years to start production. Is that normal? Also, they claim we don’t need to sign a new lease. How is that legal?

I really don’t know what my main question would be. I guess just any and all advice, information, etc., would be most appreciated. We jumped head first into this and bought the pretty dream painted to us by our Antero recruiter. Thank you to any and all that don’t mind sharing their experience, strength, and wisdom with a gal that is still using her training wheels when it comes to all this MR Game.

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Oil and Gas leases contain a primary term, which is the amount of time the Lessee has to drill on the property to hold the lease. You said yourself it was a five-year lease signed in June 2014. This means the lease expires in June of 2019. They are allowed to drill on those lands at any point in that time frame and hold the lease. Sometimes a lease will contain a clause that forces drilling operations sooner than that, but it sounds like yours doesn’t. You also said you haven’t received payment. I don’t know much about that, but I think I saw somewhere on this forum that it can take up to six months after production before you receive a royalty check.

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Forgot to mention this earlier. There was a huge downturn in the market that started late 2014. There wasn’t a lot of drilling going on then. It’s fortunate they waited until now to drill. You’ll receive bigger checks.