Seems like there should be an easy & free way to make a list of neighboring mineral rights owners, with maps & contact info. I’m working on doing this manually from free sources, but it’s very tedious & time-consuming, but it’s better than paying the $500/county or 25¢/individual search that texasfile wants. Doesn’t seem to be any way of getting this info from rrc.texas.gov or glo.texas.gov (you’d think it’d be in one of glo’s free datasets, but I can’t find it).
mineralholders gives you a 3 day free trial, so I’ll try that & report back here if they give me what I want.
If producing- you can always search the appraisal district mineral rolls. Of course you can always view the deed records free of charge by visiting the County Clerks office.
GLO is responsible for tracking state-owned minerals and lands and also maintains historical records such as land grants. The oil and gas revenues go toward Texas secondary schools. It would be a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money for GLO to track private mineral ownership and deny school funding. Similarly, RRC needs to spend its money plugging abandoned wells and not tracking private mineral ownership. It costs money to maintain any website, including this one, and we are all lucky to have access to it.
That’s all mineralholders seems to give you access to, the producing properties, which, as you point out, I can get for free from the district appraiser. And mineralholders doesn’t really seem to do maps, just what survey each lease is in. Useful, but I’d still like to know who our neighbors are & the boundaries of each tract of mineral rights. Somebody produces maps of mineral rights for landmen, but I haven’t been able to figure out who that is. First guy I asked seemed to have no idea where the maps came from, but now that I know what questions to ask, I can probably find a landman to tell me. Of course, if you happen to know who makes the maps of private mineral rights, I’m all ears. Making them from the deed records is incredibly time-consuming for me, so I might even be willing to pay a little for maps of a few surveys.
I’m a 40 year landman, an old dog. I don’t know of any company that creates maps of “mineral rights” except my own two hands. I have used maps from primarily two companies through the years, one being Acme Maps in Tyler and the other being called Edgar Tobin Aerial Surveys. Tobin is now owned Tobin Imagery - Tobin Data | P2 Energy Solutions. But, no matter the source, the landline/tract data that I’ve ever seen is surface ownership. These maps may show general lease information and well locations. But the surface is the basis of your mineral tracts. This answer is general in nature and there are many, many intricacies that apply. And remember, what mineral data you have today is probably totally out of date in 1 to 5 years – it is a moving target, always flowing through time as ownership changes.
Thanks. That explains a lot of things. I’ll contact the 2 companies you mentioned, but sounds like I just need to read the deeds very carefully (always throws me when you get to the of the description & it says “except for …”) & double, triple-check my drawings. After 40 years, do you think in varas?
Maps and Plats from App. Districts aren’t always accurate by any means. You can get a general idea from the them but they are not exactly near accurate most of the time. Deed boundaries overlap sometimes. Property line disputes are very common. Different Surveyors get different plats. But with GPS things have gotten better over the year’s. It’s complicated.
The maps of the central appraisal districts (CAD) are sketchy is some places but, overall, the information is excellent. It depends on the reason you’re compiling ownership information, but, the CAD data is probably more than adequate for mapping mineral ownership. Let’s say that back in 1929, mineral buyer A acquired a 1/4 interest in 100 acres. The 100 acres is now divided into 8 tracts. Each tract over the 100 acres is subject to 1/4 of the minerals outstanding in mineral buyer A’s ownership. These are the issues a modern day landman has to analyze to determine mineral ownership for leasing or creating paydecks for royalty distribution.
I can give everyone a way to look at land activity within a particular survey, by name and abstract number. Free. I use it for my client to see where particular companies have recorded leases. The site is www.countyrecords.com. After you select the county, from the search page scroll down to the survey name/abstract number field and scroll until you find the particular survey you need. Most counties have data back to the 1990s. Sort by date and scroll through the documents. This will show, for example, where Surprise Valley/Comstock have leases, by survey name. You might have to put up a credit card for purchases but what I’ve explained here is free unless you request the data in a PDF. Also, if you ever have a large document to download, the county records document cost is capped at $5.00. Fifty pages, no problem…it’s $5.00. I use countyrecords.com quite a bit and I’ve saved my clients many thousands of dollars of document costs.