Production details: what is a company required to report to an interest holder?

My sister and I hold non-executive rights in several properties, in Texas. We have noticed that there is a wide variation on the amount of detail provided on the check stubs by the various companies. For example, one company provides 3 pages of details, including the number of wells, the production of each and the time frames and various products. They even include details on the sale. Impressive!

On the other hand, another company has several producing wells on the lease, but they do not provide any detail at all on the individual wells, and didn't seem to want to tell us how many wells they have there, either. They provide only minimal information on the overall lease, such as time frames for each product, and told us that they only report by lease total. The detail on the check stub is pretty limited. We'd like to have more information about the individual wells. The company seems not to want to be forthcoming about production details.

My question is, How much detail are companies required to provide on check stubs, and where is this requirement documented? Thanks in advance for any help you may be able to offer.

The wells that you are not receiving much information on, may be included in a "Unit". A "Unit" may include numerous wells in several sections and may only indicate the formations from which production is being taken. Even figuring your participation % takes a mathematician.

I'm sure that there are required to provide only what is specified by law or regulation.

The company who is drilling and producing does not pay us; we are being paid by the company who purchases their production. Since posting the question I've learned a bit more about this particular situation, by talking with the purchaser:

  • the lessee/driller has the option of providing more or less information to the interest owners who receive payment. In our case, the lessee chose to provide LESS information. So, the (in our case, the company who is actually delivering a check to us), has been instructed NOT to provide more detail! The purchaser could and would provide more detail if that was the kind of agreement they had with the producing company.

We derive from this that there are no requirements for detailed production information to the interest owners...Larry, you pretty much said this, I think. We're really thankful to the high-bar companies who chose to provide details to us.