Pat, make sure you aren’t being double and triple billed for pipelines, tanks, and other surface equipment. The law is written in a very specific way on non-consent wells. 50% penalty of actual cost of drilling and completing. Many wells produce for a year or more with no pipeline? Are those wells incomplete? Hardly.
And yet your operator may try to charge you the 50% risk penalty on them.
My brother has received paperwork from Conoco where they wanted to charge him a risk penalty on operating oversight. I wonder if the risk is of the fat cat having a heart attack sitting in his office? Creative accounting, as I mentioned before.