My great grandfather kept mineral rights to land he sold in Custer County, OK. We have had several leases over the years, but they have yet to extract the natural gas. Recently, another company contacted us and one of my cousins sent her lease documents to them first for her portion of the mineral rights. Now they are telling us they are not obligated to include any other owners in the lease and they can legally only have a contract with one of us. We have never experienced this before and I don’t understand how this can be legal. I’d appreciate advice on the legality of this and how to proceed. Thank you.
This is fairly normal. There can be many mineral owners in a spacing unit for a well. There can also be many leasing agents for that spacing unit which may be comprised of many smaller tracts and ownerships. Usually an agent is given a certain amount of money to spend in a certain amount of time. In the end, before the well is drilled, most of the tracts will end up leased with the remainder going to the pooling case. Those remainders will be given the option to pool at a certain set of royalty/bonus pairs. How the wording on your family’s probate documents may have some bearing on the issue.
If you want to list the section, township and range, we may be able to help you find out about other agents leasing at this time.
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