New Mineral Owner - A few questions

West Virginia Mineral Rights Tyler County, WV
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Back in November of 2015 I received a letter from Texhoma Land Consultants, LLC and so did my siblings. Looking for a heir of my mother and grandmother that own a mineral interest in Doddridge County, West Virginia called the Gainer Unit. They were clearing up title to the mineral ownership and for me to call them for further discussion. I called and gave them information that I was a son and grandson of the names listed in the letter. And confirmed death of both my mother and grandmother. None of my sisters or bother knew of these mineral interest but they also called. None of us did any investigation about this and pretty much let in die.

On May 1, 2018 I receive a letter and form to sign from JAY-BEE Production Company, by its agent DMRB Services, LLC. It was regarding their year-end audit it came to their attention that a revised Designation of Units had been filed by their WV office and in doing so this changed the pooling percentage used in calculating my royalty decimal interest. Attached is a new Division of Interest (DOI) and will need to be signed notarized, and mailed back. We realize you have already done this once, however your decimal interest has changed so we will need new executed forms on file. They apologized for the inconvenience and put procedures in place so going forward this mistake will not be repeated. I had not received anything from them before this letter. My siblings said to sign and notarize it, which I did without question. There was a lot of information with is form. Property name and numbers, effective date, pooled units comprised of all the tracts of land which total about 640 acres. Production of Gas & Oil.

So in 2018 I received two small royalty checks and at the end of the year received a letter from JAY-BEE to look for 1099 tax form. They also mentioned they may be interested should I ever decide to sell my royalty interest. I now decided to found out what being a mineral owner is all about and started searching the internet. I found this forum.

After joining and reading a lot of posts from mineral owners, it seems I’m really dumb when it comes to this topic. Does anybody have any suggestions on what I should do about my mineral interest? Do I sale? Talk to a lawyer? Or just let it as is?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Charlie C.

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Hi Charlie, I looked at the WV Office of Oil and Gas Permit search Permit search for Gainer units Select “Doddridge” as county, and “Gainer” as "Well Number’. You will find that Antero has wells with that name.

Next step is to try to find documentation on this.

Here is a link Doddridge documents online site Select “Description” from the drop down menu and put “Gainer” in the name box. There are two documents, but lots of entries indexed for this. Not sure why you are getting communications from Jay Bee about this, but perhaps there is an old lease for a vertical well owned by Jay Bee that your ancestors had signed or something. I suggest you look at the Designation of Unit documents and see if any names look familiar. Then explore the document website for names you might recognize. This site is not complete but for the last several years I think everything is included and a lot of the older documents are there as well. If you had known before you signed that the company may have been trespassing by drilling without your permission you might have had a little more leverage. However you should research this as well as you can with these links and please ask questions if you want to explore this further. You have some information that can be helpful but this is the place to start I think.

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Nancy, thanks for your quick response. I will do some research on what you suggested. I will let you know what I have found. Thanks again! Charlie