I currently am a royalty owner for five gas wells in this legal description. Briar Oil and Gas was the operator upto around Dec of last year. It was not a friendly relationship as they frequently underpaid for production of the gas or outright refused to report production. When no royalty check for January production arrived by the end of March, I initially contacted the company they had contracted with to make royalty payouts I was told they no longer worked for Briar. After numerous voice mails were left at the two telephone numbers they gave me, I filed a inquiry with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission to try to find out what was going on. I was emailed back with the information that Wentworth Operating Company now was the operator on record for those wells and given an email address and telephone number for the contact the OCC had.
I am now going on the second missed royalty payment as of the end of this month. I have verified the OKTax Commission is reporting January production for four of the five wells by Southwest Energy. But the email address appears to be a black hole and two phone calls to the telephone number resulted in a half hearted acknowledgment of a possible transfer from Briar, but no confirmation of the specific wells and no willingness to do so. I just keep getting a vague excuse of we just got paid ourselves.
Does anyone else have any experience with this Wentworth Operating Company?
I finally got a call from Michael Booze after a final email to Wentworth indicating I was sending a registered letter detailing my demand for payment and my next step was legal action if the problem was not resolved… I advised him of the failure of royalty payments and request for division orders. He claimed he would check it out and call me back that day or the following Monday. He didn’t call back, but I was sent a royalty statement in pdf form in an email a couple of days later. Apparently Arkoma Development LLC is the working interest owner.
Only three of five wells were listed, the volume produced by the wells listed was considerably less than what was reported to OKTAP/OCC, ‘Gas Deducts’ is listed as the reason over $60 was deducted from the total and of course no penalty interest was paid for the over 30 day late payment of royalties. One of the two wells not listed had documented production for both Jan and Feb. Still no division orders for any of the five wells.
I contacted Michael Booze about the problems noted and he appeared to get irritated at me that I was still not satisfied. He also refused to do division orders and was unwilling to honor my request for a monthly revenue if sales exceeded $25 as the previous well operator had done. Now I understand Division Orders are not required, but I feel it’s also an acknowledgement by them that I am due royalties on these wells.
I decided to go ahead and hired a lawyer towards the middle of May. The approach at this point is to try and get the most important corrections without a lawsuit. The lawyer sent a registered letter to them citing appropriate Oklahoma statues they should be following.
Yesterday I recieved an email from Wentworth containing a pdf of the latest royalty statement. They are finally paying me for the one well that has produced for Jan, Feb and March. But still no penalty interest for massively late payment. Again the listed production is considerably less than reported production to OKTAP/OCC, more ‘Gas Deducts’, some wells are still not listed and now they are listing the gas price at $ .18 for March. It was $2.81 for February. Almost 100% less than February. The sale price of natural gas does go down as the winter heating season ends, but it doesn’t drop that much when the Henry Hub price only drops by 22% during the same time frame.
It seems like a punitive message to me. The problem is they are pushing me and all the other royalty interest owners of these five wells towards a class action lawsuit through their actions. I’ve never had this much hassle with any other well operator before.