Over the last few years, my wife and I purchased land and minerals on the cheap. It's been our way of forced savings. We have never received a SINGLE royalty check. We always figured that's why we could buy the stuff cheap because it was all non-producing. The other day I was looking for land on line and saw a nice piece with a working oil well for sell on the property. The legal looked kind of familiar and sure enough it was in the same section where we own quite a few minerals. Got us to start thinking.................
Is there a way to find out if we are owed royalties? Is there a way of packaging or advertising what we have? Should we contact an attorney or land man? Maybe someone here can help? We have little bits and pieces scattered over Oklahoma and Texas and some even has the surface rights. Here's a list if this helps:
We have mineral rights in the following locations:
Wagoner County, Oklahoma
16N 14E Section 15 SE/4 1/32 interest
16N 16E Section 25 SW/4 NE/4 and NE/4 SW/4 1/4th interest
16N 15E Section 14 SW/4 NW/4 1/4th interest
16N 15E Section 16 n/2 SE/4 and SW/4 SW/4 1/8th interest
16N 15E Section 9 E/2 NE/4 and E/2 NW/4 1/8th interest
Tulsa County, Oklahoma
16N 14E Section 16 NW/4 ¼ interest
16N 14E Section 16 S/2 NE/4 ¼ interest
16N 14E Section 16 SE/4 1/8 interest
Rogers County, Oklahoma
20N 9E Section 24 Lot 1 18 Acres surface and 30 acres Minerals.
Believed to be Full Interest?
Limestone County, Texas
1/4 mineral interest in 18.78 acres in the P. Varela XI League Grant in Limestone, County.
Presidio County, Texas
20 Acres surface and Minerals outside Marfa Texas
Tex Mex Section 1, E/2 of SW/4 of SW/4 Split from P No. 9190
Bad legal on Rogers County. Should read 14E instead of 9E!
Have you been recording deeds in the counties in which the properties exist?
Yes. We have recorded all the deeds.
Then the landmen should be contacting you ahead of drilling. I wonder about the property owned in a section with a well. Is the well by any chance vertical and in a different quarter than where you own? I don't know how much due diligence you have done in these purchases and I hope that someone has not sold you something that they didn't own because a prior reservation somewhere back in the chain was missed.
Well is advertised as being in the SE/4 of NW/4 and I own rights in the SW/4 of the NW/4? Looks like we are in the same quarter section? I thought the pooled acres would either be 160 or 640 acres? Either way, there's got to be a way to ensure if any royalties due are paid?
I think you will have to look up the well, determine the spacing/pool of the well and if the pool includes your minerals, I would inform them I would like to be paid. If you bought some leased acres and a well was drilled after you bought them, it's possible they just paid the lessor that they knew about. It's your job to inform them of any changes. I think most times they would have caught it before paying anyone but things do slip through the cracks. I have heard of a couple times where people kept their mouth shut and collected royalty checks for minerals they had reason to know they no longer owned, sometimes for decades.
Bear in mind also that there may have been reservations not just of fractions 1/8, 1/4, ect but of different depths, somewhere back in the chain of title.
You think a landman could also package and market these rights as well? They could certainly research or validate them! Thanks for your input..........
you might check the OCC website.
http://imaging.occeweb.com/imaging/OGWellRecords.aspx\
In legal description, you can put, for example, 1516N14E and it will show wells that were drilled in there and any plugging of the wells. As a general rule, you can see if there has been recent activity, such as a form 1073, which is a change of operator. Then contact the new operator on the form to see if they have your seller on their paydeck.
As to these three counties, they are not exactly a hotbed of recent activity.
You might take a stab at some of this, if you have time. then hire somebody to help you later.
Tim,
Thanks for your advice. I feel like time is on my side in these counties. Historically they were really hot. A lot of drillers are going back into these closed formations and hitting it pretty good. Not to mention horizontal drilling technologies plus a 5-10 bopd well was capped in the 1930's for being a dead well.