Published on:

By

The Texas Supreme Court decided a case recently involving an assignment of an overriding royalty interest (ORRI) in minerals located in Wheeler County, Texas. That case is Piranha Partners et al v. Joe Neuhoff et al.

In 1975, Neuhoff Oil & Gas purchased an undivided two-thirds interest in a mineral lease known as the Puryear Lease. The lease was between the Puryears (and others) as lessors and Marie Lister as the lessee. The lease covered all of the minerals under a tract of land referred to as Section 28. A few years later, Neuhoff Oil sold and assigned its two-thirds interest, but reserved for itself a 3.75% ORRI on all production under the Puryear Lease. An ORRI is an interest that is created out of the working interest (the oil company’s or operator’s interest) in the lease. It is a fractional, undivided interest with the right to participate or receive proceeds from the sale of oil and/or gas. It is not an interest in the minerals, but an interest in the proceeds or revenue from the oil & gas minerals sold. The interest is limited to a specific tract of land and is bound by the term of the existing lease. If the underlying lease expires, the ORRI expires.

Only one well was completed on the property, the Puryear B #1-28. At some point, Neuhoff Oil & Gas sold its ORRI to Piranha Partners. A bit later, Neuhoff Oil & Gas went out of business and assigned its assets to individual members of the Neuhoff family.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

Many Texas landowners have old electric line easements on their property with companies that are no longer in business, such as the old Texas Electric Co. AEP Texas, Inc. and/or Southwestern Electric Power Company (“SWEPCO”) now own many of these easements. These easements are often incredibly vague, especially regarding what can be done with the easement in the future and as to how wide the easement is.

A recent Texas Supreme Court case dealt with one of these easements. In Southwestern Electric Power Company v. Lynch, the Court considered a 1949 easement over lands in northeast Texas that did not contain a fixed width for the easement. The initial easement contained a wooden pole transmission line.

power-lines-1526896
The original easements authorize SWEPCO “to erect towers, poles and anchors along” a set course on a right-of-way that crossed several privately owned properties. In addition, these easements granted SWEPCO the right to ingress and egress over the encumbered properties “for the purpose of constructing, reconstructing, inspecting, patrolling, hanging new wires on, maintaining and removing said line and appurtenances.” The width of the easement was not specified, however, SWEPCO historically utilized 30 feet as its easement.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

The Commissioners of the Texas Railroad Commission recently voted unanimously to amend Rule 3.40, which has to do with the assignment of acreage to pooling and proration units. The current rule provides that “… acreage assigned to a well for drilling and development, or for allocation of allowable, shall not be assigned to any other well or wells completed or projected to be completed in the same field; such duplicate assignment of acreage is not acceptable”.  According to the Commission’s press release:

The rule restricted exploration in unconventional fracture treated (UFT) fields when oil and gas mineral ownership is divided at different depths below the surface. A UFT field is a field in which horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing must be used to recover oil and gas. To take advantage of technological advances that can tap into once inaccessible hydrocarbon resources in UFT fields, Commissioners voted to allow assignment of acreage to multiple wells in these fields. This rule revision will further protect mineral owner interest and allow access to additional resources.

The amendment to Rule 3.40 will probably result in increased drilling and production in fields where there is multiple ownership at different depths below the surface of the property. That means there will be increased royalties for mineral interest owners.The amended rule goes into effect on March 3, 2020

Published on:

By

A well operated by Chesapeake Energy Corporation experienced a fiery blowout on Thursday, January 30, 2020.  The well, the Daniel H 1 H, is located in Burleson County, Texas near Deanville. The well is in an area where Chesapeake is drilling long lateral well bores to develop Eagle Ford shale deposits. Two of Chesapeake’s subcontractors, C.C. Forbes and Eagle Pressure Control, were operating a service rig to install new hardware on the well at the time of the accident. Unfortunately, three employees of these subcontractors were killed by the fire. News reports indicated that Boots & Coots, a well control company now owned by Halliburton, was hired to get the well under control and put the fire out.

KBTX-Photo-Burleson-County-well-blow-out-01_30_20

KBTX Photo

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board  (CSB) is sending a team to the well to investigate the accident. The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the agency’s board members are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. According to the CSB website: “The CSB conducts root cause investigations of chemical accidents at fixed industrial facilities. Root causes are usually deficiencies in safety management systems, but can be any factor that would have prevented the accident if that factor had not occurred. Other accident causes often involve equipment failures, human errors, unforeseen chemical reactions or other hazards. The agency does not issue fines or citations, but does make recommendations to plants, regulatory agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), industry organizations, and labor groups. Congress designed the CSB to be non-regulatory and independent of other agencies so that its investigations might, where appropriate, review the effectiveness of regulations and regulatory enforcement.”
Continue reading →
Published on:

By

The Texas Supreme Court decided an interesting case last week regarding easements. The case was Copano Energy LLC et al. v. Stanley D. Bujnoch, Life Estate, et al. One of the interesting aspects of this case was the part that emails played in the transaction.

The plaintiffs, who were the landowners, owned land in Lavaca and DeWitt counties. The landowners had previously agreed to a 30 foot wide easement to Copano for a 24 inch oil and gas pipeline. That pipeline was installed. In 2012, Copano asked the landowners for second easement to construct a 24 inch pipeline on the landowners’ property. The landman for Copano and an attorney representing the landowners exchanged a number of emails in the course of negotiating the terms of the proposed easement. In one email, the landman agreed to pay the landowners a specific price and agreed to remedy damage to the landowners’ property caused during the construction of the original pipeline. The attorney replied “In reliance on this representation we accept your offer and will tell our client you are authorized to proceed with the survey on their property.” Later emails from Copano transmitted amendments to the original easement and an amended plat. Some of these later emails offered a lower price per foot for the easement. A still later email from the secretary of the landowners’ attorney transmitted revisions to the original easement agreement pertaining to some, but not all, of the landowners’ property to the landman. A still later email from the landman stated that: “I am fine with these changes”. Finally, the project manager for Copano then sent a “compensation proposal letter” to the landowners’ attorney with completely different compensation terms. There was no written acceptance of these terms.

The second pipeline was never built. The plaintiffs claimed that the series of emails, taken as a whole, created an enforceable written contract that satisfied the Texas Statute of Frauds and sued Copano for breach of contract.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

I recently had occasion to review the Texas Supreme Court’s decision on a long-running dispute between BP America and Laddex, Ltd. The case is centered around a disagreement of the terms in a decades old lease and its result has been significant for the energy industry. The case, known as  BP America Production Co. v. Laddex, Ltd., began in 2007. British Petroleum America (BP) had been producing out of a single well on property in Roberts County, Texas since 1971, however Laddex believed BP’s lease expired and signed a top lease with the mineral owners.  BP believed they still had rights to the land and so Laddex filed suit.

Arguments

This case reached the Texas Supreme Court after both the initial jury and the Court of Appeals in Amarillo, Texas ruled in favor of Laddex. However, BP argued that the jury’s findings were incorrect as there was not sufficient evidence to support the jury’s verdict. BP also contended that Laddex’s lease is void under the Texas rule against perpetuities. Laddex argued that BP’s well had not been producing “payable quantities of oil” for 15 months and therefore any “prudent operator” would have halted all operations. Thus, according to Laddex, the terms of the BP lease stated that should BP’s production stop, the lease would be terminated and the rights given back to the lessor, allowing Laddex the right to sign a new lease and assume operations on the property.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

Recently the Texas Supreme Court decided an interesting case in which it examined whether a will had given a surface estate or a mineral estate to the beneficiaries of the will. In ConocoPhillips et al v. Leon Oscar Ramirez Jr. et al,  the testatrix, Leonor Juan, executed a will in 1987 and died the next year. The will devised a life estate in “all of [her] right, title and interest in and to

Ranch ‘Las Piedras’”to her son Leon Oscar Sr. with the remainder to his living children in equal shares and devised the residual of her estate equally to her three children, Leon Oscar Sr.,

Ileana, and Rodolfo. In this case, Leon Oscar Sr.’s children claim that Leonor’s residual estate did not include the mineral interest in Las Piedras Ranch but that it passed to Leon Oscar Sr. as part of his life estate.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

picspree-1121808-300x202Texas has been, unfortunately, home to a number of oil and gas scams over the years. One of the most common is the company who wants to buy your mineral interests and who has you sign a deed before they pay you. Once they have a signed deed in hand, they then decide that your minerals are worth much less than what they originally offered, and they send you a check for a fraction of the purchase price they originally offered.

A more recent scam is the use of “oil and gas royalty leases”. The document the scammers ask you to sign is designed to look like an oil and gas lease and it is actually worded as if it were an oil and gas lease. For example, they often call the purchase price a “bonus”. In fact, the document is a deed for your nonparticipating royalties. Of course, nonparticipating royalty owners cannot sign leases, as a matter of law, but many people do not know this.

I have heard that the scammers in one case admitted that their so-called royalty lease was purposely designed as a lease instead of as a deed because people were afraid to sign deeds but would more readily sign leases.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

I negotiate many power line easements on behalf of property owners each year. Generally, the utility company wants to pay for only the easement itself and refuses to acknowledge that the presence of the power line could have an effect on the overall value of the property. In part, that is because there is very little data out there on the effect of power lines on property values.

A recent study in the Journal of Real Estate Research makes some inroads on that lack of data. The study was conducted by David Wyman and Chris Mothorpe of the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. They used a sample of 5455 vacant lots in Pickens County, South Carolina that were sold between 2000 and 2016 and determined that properties adjacent to high voltage power lines experienced discounts of 44.9% of their value because of the power line. They also determined that there was a discount of 17.9% for vacant properties that were up 1,000 feet away from the power line.

power-lines-1526896
The study used only vacant lots so as to eliminate the effect on value due to varying types of improvements on the land. Professors Mothorpe and Wyman suggest that there are three factors that may influence the amount of the discount. One is the perception of health impacts associated with proximity to high-voltage lines. The unattractive view of a high voltage line on or near property is another factor. Finally, as anyone who has lived near a high-voltage line can attest, the lines produce a humming sound that can be extremely irritating.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

The United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently issued a report that in September 2019 the United States exported more crude oil and petroleum products than it imported. This is the first month in the history of recorded data (since 1949) that exports have exceeded imports. Specifically, 8.76 million barrels were exported from the U. S. during that month, surpassing the 8.6 million barrels that were imported. The report also indicated that the EIA expects the U. S. to be a net exporter of crude oil and petroleum products through 2020 as well.

Much of this increase is due to the energetic production in the Texas Permian basin and Eagle Ford Shale. Abundant production has significant national security implications. When we are producing enough of our own oil and gas, we are less dependent on the vagaries of foreign governments, such as OPEC. Some of us are old enough to remember when the OPEC manipulations caused gas shortages in the United States and long lines at service stations.