Mineral Owners Most Challenging Issues Poll

[gdonner]

The two most challenging issues for me are:

• Communicating with oil and gas companies.
• The legal cost/time involved in establishing a probate and/or obtaining an officially researched title of all your mineral interests.

But communication with oil and gas companies is the primary headache, because many companies are anything but forthright with you as the mineral owner.

Sometime ago, myself and other members of my family were suddenly missing multiple months of revenue from EOG Resources on relatively new wells. It took me a bunch of e-mails and a lot of wasted time with EOG reps to finally get the answer that:

I looked further into the matter and it appears that there was an overpayment that was made to your mom and that trickled down to you. EOG had to recoup the funds that were overpaid. Those funds have now been fully recouped, starting last December, and you are in full Pay Status for your interest. Unfortunately, that is about the extent of the information that is able to be provided to you.

This kind of disregard and lack of transparency for mineral owners is unacceptable. EOG Resources could easily–and should have–informed me and my family by e-mail or letter the minute that the overpayment was discovered that X amount of overpayment revenue was going to be withheld, and for approximately how long.

EOG would have been saving their own reps from wasting time “researching” what should have been a simple notification explaining what was going on. Mineral owners aren’t stupid or ignorant; there are now tools like MineraliQ that alert us to something fishy going on (in my case, I noticed that the wells were still producing while months of revenue were missing).

It’s rather chilling that companies even try to hide data from their mineral interest owners. Then they wonder why there are class action lawsuits filed against them. EOG was, in fact, one of those companies slapped with a class action lawsuit in recent years.

[TripleF]

All of these listed items are important! First, for me right now is my lack of knowledge! People on tis forum have been a godsend to me. It is HERE that I feel that I am getting the help I need. I will soon be personally finding out how difficult it is to: clear title to inherited minerals, Royalties in Suspense, and Probate. Then will come either 1) estate planning so my kids will not have to go though what I’m going through right now, or 2) Valuing my minerals for sale.

[M_Barnes]

Many of us on this forum started out where you are. The Mineral Help tab above is useful. The corporation commission sites in the producing states have varying levels of usefulness.

Plug here… The National Association of Royalty Owners has conventions in most of the producing states or regions. The season is just beginning for those. Some are in person; some are virtual. Most of the larger conventions such as Texas and Oklahoma have a whole teaching time at their conventions. Mineral Rights 101 or something similar to that. Well worth going to and I dragged my children to a few of them just like my parents dragged me thirty years ago. I rolled my eyes back then, but little did I know how valuable that training would turn out to be. The National Website has the convention dates and access to very helpful webinars for members. The first year membership is fairly inexpensive. Several of us on the forum are directors in our state chapters so we have given of our time to educate our peers and their next generations. Check it out. OK convention is next week and they do have a training class. The convention itself is a fantastic way to network and meet other mineral owners. TX is in July. www.naro-us.org.