Articles Posted in Oil and Gas Law

As a Texas oil and gas attorney, I have followed with great interest the tumultuous relationship that seems to perpetually exist between Texas and its landowners on one hand, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the other. Unfortunately, some misguided policymakers are under the mistaken notion that the EPA is working to protect the environment, and that the efforts of Texas and other states to fight those federal regulations are misguided. That oversimplification could not be further from the truth.

As Texas Comptroller Susan Combs explained in a recent editorial published in the Star Telegram, Texans are committed to the well-being of their air, land, and water. If legitimate steps need to be taken to protect the long-term well-being of our resources, Texans have and will continue to be the first to step up and take action. Unfortunately, many of the EPA’s latest regulations and requirements passed in the name of environmental protection actually protect next to nothing, and have no scientific basis whatsoever, yet come with very significant detrimental consequences for Texas residents.As Combs notes, “private landowners are the best stewards of their own property.” She goes on to say that the EPA continues to ignore the knowledge and reasonableness of our private property owners when making arbitrary decisions that have effects on their land and lives. Even more troubling, at times the Agency seems to specifically target Texas in ways that defy common sense and scientific reality. For example, Combs discussed the EPA’s new “cross-states” air pollution rule. The new regulation will disproportionately affects Texans. The measure targets nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide. Texas plants produce roughly eleven percent of the sulfur dioxide targeted by the regulation, yet, inexplicably, Texas is being ordered to absorb a quarter of the reductions-more than double its actual share.

Anyone who understands the energy industry in our state understands the significant impacts the regulation will have. The state’s largest power generator, Luminant, explained that the rule will eliminate 500 Texas jobs as two generating units are being idled and three ignite mine operations halted. In addition, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas reported that the rule may increase electricity rates for consumers, because the state’s generation capacity will be reduced in the peak load months of summer.

When a Texas mineral owner asks me to review or negotiate an oil and gas lease offer they have received, one of the first things I do is to determine who the proposed operator, or lessee, will be. Many people do not realize how important it is to know just who you are leasing to. If you do not investigate the proposed lessee before you sign, you may be throwing away the royalties you could have received had you leased to a competent oil and gas company.

First, I determine whether the potential lessee is a licensed oil and gas operator. I strongly urge my clients not to sign a lease with a middleman. Instead, I insist that the actual oil company who will be operating the lease be disclosed so we can do a background check on them. There can be many potential problems if you sign a lease with a middleman. These include, (but are certainly not limited to), the following problems:1) The company who contacted you may be a broker or a “lease hound”, that is, a person or company who tries to sign up leases cheaply and then sell them to a real oil company for a huge markup. I prefer to see my client be paid that markup, rather than the middleman.

2) They may be an agent for a “boiler-room” operation, who make their money by selling interests in a lease or “drilling program” as an investment. They make their money on the sale of these interests, and could care less about drilling a good well, or treating your minerals or the surface of the property competently. In some cases, they don’t care if a well is drilled or not, because they have already made their money.

It is incumbent upon a Texas oil and gas lawyer to keep abreast of all relevant decisions from appellate courts and the state’s highest court. Proper advocacy demands that attorneys understand changes in the law and be able to incorporate those changes in their legal representation. Lawyers must have an awareness of all the legal tools at their disposal so they can provide zealous advocacy and competent representation for a client, whether in a dispute, guiding a landowner through the negotiation process for a lease, preparing a mineral deed or a number of other tasks.

There remain many areas of Texas oil and gas law with questions that are unanswered, and our courts are frequently providing guidance on those issues. For example, the Texas Supreme Court recently handed down a decision in Lesley v. Texas Veterans Land Board that provided further clarification on the rights and responsibilities that executive rights holders owe to mineral owners.

A mineral estate is basically a bundle of various property rights. One of those rights is known as the “executive right”, which is the ability to enter into an oil and gas lease. This is distinct from other rights of mineral ownership, such as the right to collect royalties, bonus or delay rentals pursuant to an oil and gas lease. More often than not a single owner will possess all of these rights, meaning they can choose to lease and will receive payment for royalties due under that lease. However, these rights can be split between one or more persons or entities. When those rights are split, the holder of the executive right owes a duty of “utmost fair dealing” to other owners of a mineral interest.

Practicing oil and gas law in Texas competently also requires being aware of the “bigger picture” in which I work. One component of that bigger picture these days is the issue of energy independence.

Energy independence has become a major political issue in recent years, and has resulted in increased efforts to find ways to reduce the United States’ dependence on importing foreign oil to meet our nation’s energy needs. Renewable energy sources and nuclear solutions have been discussed as alternatives to importing oil, but our country’s natural gas reserves are also an important part of our national energy policy moving forward. Ancillary to this national discussion, the production of natural gas, and in particular, the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracing, has come under attack.Natural gas is often contained within dense shale formations underground, and fracing is a process used to extract those reserves of natural gas. The process itself involves the use of water combined with sand and chemicals and pumped into the shale formations to fracture them and allow the release of the gas held in the rock.

To my knowledge (and I research this issue), there has never been a documented case of the fracing process injuring a water well. Those who suggest otherwise (such as the producers of “Gasland”) are not being honest with the public or themselves. I wrote a previous article on this blog outlining the reasons for my statement.

An experienced oil and gas lawyer understands how politics influences the rules and regulations placed upon those working in the energy industry. Unfortunately, that political influence means that decisions about how the industry is regulated are often not guided by common sense, logic, and fair-minded decision-making. Instead, oil and gas regulations are frequently spurred by knee-jerk, reactionary administrators who are more concerned with appeasing loud public voices than making choices that are necessary and reasonable in light of all the information.

One is hard pressed to turn on a television news channel or flip open a newspaper without hearing or reading some story vilifying oil and gas companies and calling for new measures to control their activities. A cruel caricature is often painted of those who work in the energy industry which ignores the fact that these individuals are regular citizens working each day in a business that remains vital to national productivity. The unflattering and inaccurate public portrayal of the industry often causes appointed bureaucrats to impose new regulation after new regulation on these businesses. To make matter worse, those making these regulatory decisions are rarely knowledgeable about the day-to-day activities of those working in this field, and they usually ignore the effect that their arbitrary rules have on the business.For example, the US Department of Interior (DOI) and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) announced a spate of new workplace regulations recently for all offshore oil and gas producers. As reported last week in the Oil and Gas Journal, these new regulations will require certain actions be performed on these rigs in an apparent effort to improve workplace safety. These include guidelines for reporting unsafe work conditions, stop-work action procedures, safety audit requirements, and a variety of other mandates. While everyone can agree that safety should always be prioritized, heaping new requirements on the industry is rarely the best way to achieve that goal.

If history is any indication, these new rules from federal regulators will likely do little to address the actual safety goals and instead only stifle each company’s ability to respond on its own to the unique safety challenges that it faces on the ground. As those working in the field of oil and gas law know, when push comes to shove it almost always makes more sense for those actually working in these environments to decide the ideal safety protocols instead of regulations being handed down on high from those walking the halls in Washington D.C.

Texas oil and gas attorneys are watching with trepidation as Obama seeks to cripple domestic mineral production with his ill-conceived policies. In our previous post, we discussed the Obama administration’s push to eliminate some of the tax subsidies that oil and gas producers in the United States currently enjoy. One of the subsidies that will be cut — if the President’s Fiscal Year 2012 Budget is approved — is percentage depletion for oil and gas wells, or the “oil depletion allowance” as Speaker Boehner recently called it. According to an article on Texas Insider, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates that repealing percentage depletion would generate 607 million dollars in 2012, and 11.2 billion dollars over the next decade, in additional tax revenue. While that extra income would surely help the federal government’s bottom line, it is not a smart policy due to the adverse affects it will have on oil and gas exploration and ultimately, retail gas prices. Before we can address these potential effects, however, it is helpful to have an understanding of what the “oil depletion allowance” is.

Depletion allowances let the owner of an asset account for the portion of that product as it is used up. Depletion allowances are similar to depreciation in that they provide cost recovery for capital investments — it is a tax structure to ensure that the financial burden of using resources is not borne by businesses in a lump sum. There are two types of depletion allowances available to oil and gas producers: cost depletion and percentage depletion. Cost depletion allows a taxpayer to recover the actual capital investment through the period of income production of the oil and/or gas reserves, and the cumulative amount recovered through cost depletion cannot exceed the taxpayer’s original capital investment. The other form of depletion is percentage depletion, which allows oil and gas producers and mineral rights owners to recover a portion of the mineral that is used up, or depleted, at a rate of fifteen percent of the average daily gross income from their operation each year. Unlike cost depletion, cumulative depletion deductions under the percentage model can be greater than the original capital investment made to exploit those resources.

The White House’s 2012 budget seeks to eliminate percentage depletion for oil and gas wells, leaving only cost depletion as a means for recovering such capital investment costs for the domestic independent oil and gas industry. The effects of such a change would be substantial. According to the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), removing percentage depletion as an option for small oil producers would force these companies to reduce their drilling budgets anywhere from twenty to thirty-five percent. The IPAA goes on to say that the independent oil industry accounts for almost four million jobs in the United States, and that the elimination of percentage depletion will increase taxes and result in fewer employment opportunities for Americans. Furthermore, the IPAA asserts that the elimination of percentage depletion will increase our nation’s dependence on foreign oil and result in less governmental revenue going forward.

Texas oil and gas attorneys are watching the recent series of drilling moratoriums by the federal government with great interest. In a recent blog post, I discussed the legal background behind the first deepwater drilling moratorium and the litigation that followed.Because a federal judge ruled that the first deepwater drilling moratorium should be set aside as “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), the U S Department of the Interior (“DOI”) was left with a choice: either lift the deepwater drilling moratorium completely, or try to instate a new moratorium that might pass APA muster.

In an unsurprising move, the DOI issued a second deepwater drilling moratorium. The second moratorium banned exactly the same activities as the first moratorium, although it used slightly different grounds to do so. While the first moratorium banned activities occurring at depths greater than 500 feet, the second moratorium restrained all rigs that use subsea blowout preventers or surface blowout preventers on a floating facility. In reality, the second moratorium restrained precisely the same rigs as the first moratorium. The DOI defended their second attempt by explaining that, although the second moratorium was similar in effect to the first moratorium, the second moratorium did address the technical concerns highlighted in the District Court’s first order.

In November 2010, the DOI lifted the second moratorium. However, despite the fact that the moratorium was lifted, the DOI was slow to issue new permits for activities covered by the two moratoriums.

As a Texas oil and gas attorney, I have followed with great interest the actions of the US Department of Interior (DOI) to finally lift the post-BP Oil Spill moratorium on deepwater drilling. It has been a long and legally complex road, but finally the DOI has taken the initial steps necessary to end the moratorium and re-start deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. So far, three deepwater drilling projects have been approved. A project sponsored by a Texas corporation, ATP Oil & Gas, was one of the lucky three.

In my next two blog posts, I’ll discuss the legal background behind the two deepwater drilling moratoriums issued by the Obama administration, the litigation challenging those moratoriums, and the current state of deepwater drilling operations.

Immediately after the BP oil spill disaster, the DOI issued a “Moratorium Notice to Lessees and Operators,” which: 1) directed oil and gas lessees and operators to cease drilling new deepwater wells; 2) prohibited the

As a Texas oil and gas attorney, I am keenly interested in the political climate in which the oil and gas industry operates. Politics has a lot to do with how much oil and gas this country produces. For example, in the White House’s proposed Budget for the Department of Energy in fiscal year 2012, Barack Obama set forth a budget that “eliminates inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” The administration did so as a part of its ongoing plan to shift the nations energy policy toward investments in “clean energy sources” like photovoltaics and wind power generation. This issue is one that has gained even greater notoriety when Republican House Speaker John Boehner recently informed ABC News that he was open to eliminate one of these tax breaks — the “ oil depletion allowance” — for large oil companies as a measure to help maintain the fiscal health of the government. He went on to state that he was open to evaluating the President’s proposed subsidy cuts as well. In response, the President wrote a letter to Speaker Boehner and other Congressional leaders asking them to support the elimination of the oil and gas industry tax subsidies.In the aforementioned interview, Speaker Boehner stated that small and independant oil producers in the United States need the “oil depletion allowance.” Representative Boehner went on to say that smaller oil firms need those subsidies to continue the current rate of exploration for new sources of petroleum reserves within U.S. borders. A later statement issued by his office stated that Boehner wishes to increase the amount of energy produced in the country to free the country from the market vagaries of oil sourced abroad, and that the President’s proposed plan would boost gas prices higher. Should the budget be approved unamended by Congress, around 4 billion dollars worth of subsidies and tax breaks will disappear, and the ramifications of such a move could have an adverse effect on our recovering economy.

Boehner’s statements to ABC illustrate the importance of evaluating all sides to this issue, and highlight the fact that the domestic oil industry is not solely comprised of billion dollar corporations. In fact, according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), small scale oil producers do the majority of oil exploration in the United States. Such organizations employ only twelve individuals on average, but they drill ninety-five percent of new oil wells, and produce two-thirds of our nation’s domestic oil and natural gas. In our next post, we will examine the existing “oil depletion allowance,” the proposed budget’s tax subsidy cuts, and the effect such changes could have on independent oil producers in the US.