My family owns property in Grayson County Texas. We have 100% ownership of the mineral estate. We have decided that we want to sell 110 acres of our approximately 310 acre farm and were planning on maintaining the entire mineral estate. We have a reasonable offer from a large investment firm out of Dallas. They made no offer to purchase the mineral rights. However, they do want us to relinquish our right of ingress/egress from the portion we would be selling.
We do know that there is natural gas and possibly oil that sits deep under the property. I do not know any specifics, but whatever was found was deemed not worth extracting yet.
The distance from the portion we would be keeping to the edge of our mineral estate would be approximately 1300 ft except for one diagonal portion which would be 1800 ft. Is 1300-1800 feet materially meaningful or would we be making a grave mistake relinquishing our access? Probably hard to know without knowing what exactly is underground…
Just some calculations that might help. Don’t know the answer to your main question though. If its conventional drilling, I would assume they may need to drill a well near (40 acres) or directly on top of where they would extract.
Most likely the buyer is wanting to protect the purchased surface for its sole use, whether to be subdivided into lots and sold or for solar or wind farm or for some other use. This is understandable because the surface is subsidiary to the minerals for development and the buyer does not want wells or facilities on its surface. Looking at RRC, recent permits in Grayson County are vertical wells, mostly 5,000 to 9,000 feet. If there is no surface access, then any wells would need to be directional (slanted from retained surface to the target) and I do not know how that affects the operator’s ability to recomplete in a shallower formation. You need to have an oil and gas and real property attorney review the exact proposed deed language to have an exact picture of what is involved, how extensive is the language and how that affects your retained minerals and other surface. Do you have good road access to your retained surface? It seems unlikely that you be able to go through the sold portion. How do the electric power lines run to your retained land vs the sold land? Is the purchaser also agreeing that it will have no access to the severed surface through your other land? Would that be for any purpose, including electric and water pipelines or access to your existing water wells? It is not necessarily good or bad, but you want your remaining surface to be protected.
A buyer agreeing for the seller to retain the mineral interest but wanting a waiver of surface use on the acreage they are buying isn’t unusual. It will take some additional negotiation but an attorney familiar with real estate can give you some alternatives.
One way would be having the size and location of a potential drill site, and a limited use easement to access it, designated in the deed. But there may be other approaches that would satisfy the buyer without having to specifically pin the location down now.