We are working on my grandfather’s probate in Oklahoma…which includes several working interests.
The probate lawyer is telling us that we need to produce the lease(s). We have assignments for each working interest but he says that doesn’t work…my understanding is the working interest is an investment in the well itself so aren’t the leases between the mineral owners and the company?
Can someone help us figure out what we need? Thanks so much!
Read your assignments and look at the exhibits. A Working Interest owners (WI) is the lessee under a lease. To become a WI, your grandfather was assigned all or a portion of one or more leases. Usually the assignment will reference the original lessor and original lessee and the recording book and page. You can then pull the recorded leases from the county records. A well can have one or many working interest owners, depending on the number of leases and the number of partial assignments of the leases.
Your attorney is probably asking you to provide copies of the actual oil & gas leases that were assigned. A working interest is usually obtained through an interest in an ogl, but can also be established when an unleased mineral owner participated in the drilling, completion & producing of a well. The assignments will show what leases your grandfather acquired an interest in. The books & pages of those leases should be shown on the assignment so you can get copies of those from the county clerk’s office.
Thanks for your help! What documents are we looking for if we don’t have an assignment on some of them? and do these things ever “die”? alot of them are decades old…
The WI have to be based on either (1) an assignment into your grandfather of all or a portion of one or more leases or (2) unleased minerals that he owned. You need to research the county deed records for documents in and out of the name of your grandfather or a company that he owned. Either assignments of the interests in the leases or mineral deeds. IF you cannot get to the county and the records are limited on-line, then you may need to have a landman search the county records for you. If grandfather owned WI at the time of his death, then he should have been receiving JIB statements for the monthly costs of well operations, property taxes, etc from the operator and been sending checks. If the interests were very small, then he may have been in minimum suspense for any revenues. Often the costs are netted out of the revenues, but he would be billed for any excess costs. You can contact the operator to ask which wells are operating or plugged and the basis of his interest in the well - eg by a lease assignment or as an unleased mineral owner. This will take some effort to figure everything out.
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