Oil and Gas Question

[Raymond.Franklin31]

Hi there!

I have what I hope will be some very basic oil & gas questions. Forgive me in advance, I don’t have an oil & gas background.

I’m researching a company that has exchanged shares of its stock purportedly for leased oil and gas assets in Pecos County, Texas. The company announced several exchanges with multiple parties in the Summer of 2018. It’s my understanding that these exchange agreements need to be filed or recorded with the county somehow. However, after searching proprietary sites (texasfile.com and tx.countygovernmentrecords.com) for these county records, it appears that only some of the agreements have been filed.

In addition, the identifying information for the assets in question (things like well numbers, abstract numbers, APIs, RRC IDs) appear to be identical in some of the exchange agreements with different parties. Being, a novice I suppose it’s possible that these parties are only selling a partial interest in these assets, which would explain why some of the agreements are essentially identical across different sellers.

My questions are:

1. Am I correct that sale or exchange of leased oil and gas assets would have to be filed with the county (Pecos in this case)?

2. Are there any exceptions where that’s not the case?

3. Is there any reason why multiple parties would be selling what appear to be the same assets? Or is it just safe to assume these parties have a partial interest in the same assets?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Ray

[TennisDaze]

Minerals can be owned in fractional interests, such as 10 people own minerals in 100 acres, and so there can be multiple leases covering the same gross acreage. Similarly, a lease can be divided among multiple lessees / working interests and a company would have to acquire the interests of all of the lessees to own 100% of the lease. Such assignments are recorded in the county where the minerals are located. However, one corporation can instead acquire the stock of another company or two companies can merge. Then the leases can be left in the name of the original lessee as it will be a subsidiary of the purchaser. Sometimes companies will change the names of one or more affiliates into a new or existing company by filing appropriate documents with the state corporation records. Notice may or may not be filed in the counties. If you post the name of the company or companies involved, you may get a response from someone familiar with the specific situation. You may be able to find out some answers from SEC filings or you can try looking at corporationwiki for inter-related companies.