I co-own some farm land near Lubbock, Texas with some distant family members due to an inheritance. My share of the land is about 12 acres with mineral rights of 1/54th. I heard they leased to a landman about 2 years ago but I have not been contacted. Is it possible in Texas to lease mineral rights on co-owned land without including all the owners? How can I find out if the section of land was leased?
Hi Blake,
Take a look at the definition of "co-owned" vs. "undivided interests" and determine which applies to you. Your acreage is small so your undivided interest may have been ignored. I don't know. Check with the other owners about the lease details and contact the lessee. It could be that you may be in for a good break if the lessee caused a good well to be drilled and you were not leased. Good luck and be patient.
Yes, they can ignore you. There is a video on the home page that shows you how to check for production. As for leases, you will have to get a title company to check for you.
Thanks for your responses. I have an undivided interest. The owners (descendants of my grandparents) that I personally know are in the same predicament; we all inherited our shares from the same person. Our combined (undivided) share is about 108 acres. The heirs on the other side of the family who own the majority share of the property have not been of any help.
Apparently, I don't have the information needed to use the Texas Railroad Commission GIS site. I only have the tax appraisal site information on the property and it does not include the block or section number.
I'm thinking I may need to get my family's side to agree to pay for an attorney to look into this but maybe there is a better way to handle this. I would hate to pay an attorney to tell me that there is no lease and that I could have found that out myself.
Blake, as a mineral owner I will give you my opinion and suggestions. Each undivided mineral owner is free is lease their minerals without consulting anyone. To find out if your relatives have leased their minerals, go to the county clerk's office in Lubbock and see if any leases are on file. Start by looking for the names of your individual relatives names in the "Grantor" Index. If any leases or memorandums of lease are recorded, you can then look them up in the deed records and find out the name of the oil company or broker they leased to. At least you will know if it is a rumor that they leased, or if it is a fact. The leases may have subsequently been assigned to someone else, but this will give you a starting place. You can contact the oil company of record and let them know your minerals are available for lease and go from there. (If you find no record of leases, maybe you will be contacted by someone wanting to lease in the future.) Good luck!
There is indeed an oil gas mineral lease recorded in 2011 (not just a memorandum) listed for one of our relatives on the county clerk's web site. The legal description listed does not translate to the same descriptions as the tax appraisal site, though. By looking at the tax appraisal site I can see that she apparently has 100% ownership of one section of the farm. Hopefully, that is what she leased.
If an undivided mineral owner is free to lease is the grantee able to use the entire property mineral rights without the other owners permission and/or knowledge? If I was the only person to lease my property with 1/54th mineral rights would the grantee receive everything else that was pumped?
Yes, it is possible to LEASE the other mineral owners without contacting you, but it is not wise to DRILL without leasing all the mineral owners on a given tract of land because doing so means that the operator potentially will lose money. There are a variety of reasons for why you might not have been contacted yet. For example, with the price of natural gas so low, it might be that the Lessee is waiting for the price to come back before filling in the gaps on their leasing program. In Lubbock County, an operator is more likely to drill for crude oil, so this theory might not apply. Also, the Lessee might have gone out of business, gone bankrupt, or lost investors. And they might have drilled some wells nearby and decided to abandon leases in the immediate vicinity.
Like somebody else suggested, you should contact whoever currently owns the Leases that your family member signed and ask them what's going on.