Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Mineral rights questions

As mentioned in a previous thread my wife and I are hoping to buy a 5 acre property and build a home. Our realtor found out yesterday that the seller does not have the mineral rights and neither he nor the realtor that is representing him knows who owns the mineral rights. So we are trying to figure out how that might impact us in the future if we do buy the property and build a home there.

There are natural gas wells in the vicinity but I am not sure how close the nearest one is. I wonder if there is a map of current wells? Our realtor said that if there is a current well nearby then a gas company would not likely drill another one but we are not sure on those details.

Do any of you have any advice on figuring this out? We would obviously not want to build and then have the owner of the mineral rights come in and drill a gas well or something like that.

I called a local gas company but no one was available to answer my questions. Hopefully someone will get back to me.

The mineral rights are probably with the original tract way before any division of it occurred.

When you buy land, get a survey, and close the property transaction at a title company.

The survey will show any easements that affect the land itself, and the Schedule B part of the title commitment issued and researched by the title company will have the recorded documents listed of any mineral rights on the property and who owns them, as well as the book, page and volume the minerals and other easements are filed in.

Realtors and the local gas company have NO clue at all.

You need to find out who has the rights and then find out about the lease.

These days I am more worried about gravel than oil and gas.

You can research the mineral rights at the court house. It's public record. These days it's almost impossible to buy mineral rights with any property. You are buying surface rights. Somebody else owns what's under it.

Our place was mined[magnesium] back around the turn of the 19th century. Mineral rights are still held.
Our title insurance basically covers our home should someone come forth to mine again.

Out west, that is exactly the title company's job description...to find and identify liens, encumbrances, limitations, exclusions, rights of way, encroachments etc etc. Mineral rights, water rights clearly fall under their purview.

Hire a good landman to sort it out. He'll get you all the answers in a fraction of the time you will.

What part of Arkansas. My company operates almost 500 wells in NW Arkansas. PM me if you'd like some insight. To find out who owns the mineral rights, you'll have to go to the courthouse and do a search.

If the minerals are under lease you'll want to check the lease for surface use provisions for your tract.

A hundred dollar title search could offer some info, you need to run one anyway.

Realtors are a zero and also not held accountable for anything they might tell you.

JFC

There are also minimum set backs for wells from residential homes along with the minimum number of acres per well. Arkansas may be different, but I would doubt that 5 acres is enough that someone could put a well on your property along with the set back issue.

Thanks for the info. I sure wish I knew everything about everything like Alwaysoutdoors obviously does.

Mineral rights will be recorded (at least in Oklahoma and Texas) and registered at the county Tax Assessors office.
All land deeds and land ownership records are located there.

As a side note, someone else may hold the "mineral rights", but whoever wants to access the minerals "MUST" negotiate access (ingress/egress) with you, the land "owner".
In the past, "slant wells" were highly illegal. These days, "directional drilling" has become the norm. So there is that. They can produce a zone directly under your home from your neighbors property.
How they determine "what" is being produced from "whom" and which "zone", I have no idea?! The big benefit is that several different formations can be produced from one well site. i.e., less surface damage for more production.

They still can't suck the oil out from under your land if they don't have the mineral rights, or your land is not part of the pool of mineral right owners that comprise the drilling unit.

In fact they have setbacks as to how close they can get to the boundaries of the drilling unit.

This is fact. Hire a landman.....they do this stuff every day.

"When you buy land, get a survey, and close the property transaction at a title company."

The title company doesn't always get it right. When I worked for SW Bell we had two full time right of way employees who did nothing but research and buy telephone easements. They spent most of their time proving that we had an existing telephone easement because a title company said we didn't. When I retired I had to go to the tax office to research an easement because the Austin power said the only buried utility easements in a new subdivision were for electric only. I spent many hours at the tax office before I found that the original survey report that showed that the easement Austin power claimed was electric only was actually a Public Utility Easement.

Yes but that's what title insurance is for.

Start there. Exactly how does he know the seller does not have them?

Records can be tricky. I used to know an old guy here who had an auto repair and salvage yard business on a major 2 lane US highway. He owned a lot of highway frontage. They decided to widen the highway to 4 lanes and they told him to move his junk cars to back behind their easement. He said they didn't have an easement. They said they did. They were wrong. He knew exactly who owned what. They got their easement but they paid him $800,000 for high priced commercial land.