I am new to this forum, and I have a complex issue related to a family lease in Williams County ND.
The issue is that a quarter section under lease includes the shoreline of a lake, surveyed with a lake bed that spans parts of four sections. The lake is not classified (either as navigable or non-navigable). The producer has assigned lake bead mineral acreage to various mineral owners surrounding the lake, using BLM surveying handbooks as a guide for “equitable” allocation. This allocation allows for lake bed acreage to span section boundaries.
The problem is, this causes production in an adjacent section (a tiny number of lake bed acres allocated to the family without notification, tied to the lease in a different section and spacing unit) to place a Held By Production on the entire quarter section that is not producing, even after the lease expires.
Is there a way out of this conundrum?
If you have the time try to find answers to these questions:
Who created the lake and how was the land taken?
If by eminent domain, did the taker only acquire the surface only in their taking or, everything below it? In Texas, many Corp of Engineering lakes only took the surface as no one ever thought of horizontal drilling coming into play. Same occurred with many state highways;
Try looking for early (pre-lake) plats and surveys to further identify if your land was part of the taking.
You reference BLM but I am not familiar as to how that affects the Held by Production part and allocations.
The lake is natural with no outflow. The lake bed is about 110 acres, 6 lots in four different sections surround it. Our family quarter section (approx.) is “clipped” by the lake bed in its NE corner - the intersection of four sections - by 0.6 acres (ugh!). The survey is the initial 1899 survey after North Dakota statehood (surprisingly easy to find online). Surrounding lakes were all surveyed as “land” (too shallow, probably) owned by the lot or owner - these were the homesteading days in ND. Many of the surrounding lakes also span multiple sections, but without any mineral rights ambiguity.
The four lots to the east of the north/south section line are under lease to a single owner (found in iDocMarket, with subscription).
The BLM survey handbooks were used to allocated the lake bed acres (crossing section lines), which were added retroactively to the lease (without notification). There is a clause in the lease that allows this, but it looks like a pretty standard clause - next lease we do, we will require notification. The the HBP was placed on our entire lease when the sections to the east went into production. A Pugh Clause (not in our lease, sigh) would not have even prevented this hold. It took the family years to figure out all the nuances that allowed this “grab”.
Hello, our family has a battled similar issues since 2019, and still have unresolved issues. We did get the oil companies (Grayson Mill and Chord) to release the amounts held in suspense in the section that didn’t involve the dry lakebed portion, but only after getting an attorney involved. We still haven’t dealt with the dry lakebed portions but it’s on the list after dealing with accretion on the Yellowstone River (a huge mess!!!) Our acres are in McKenzie County not Williams County BTW. Good luck.