Hawaii mineral rights

HRS s. 182-2, Mineral rights reserved to the State

All minerals in, on or under state lands or reserved lands are reserved to the State, and the board may release, cancel or waive the reservation where it thinks a land use other than mining is of greater benefit to the State. The minerals are reserved from sale or lease except as the chapter provides, and a purchaser or lessee of the land acquires no right, title or interest in them: their right is subject to the reservation and to the State and its licensees prospecting for, mining and removing the minerals and occupying and using so much of the surface as is required. Every land patent, lease, grant or other conveyance of state land must itself be subject to and contain that reservation, together with a reserved right to mine by deep mining, strip mining, drilling and any other means whatsoever. The reach of all this turns on one definition: reserved lands means lands owned or leased by any person in which the State or its predecessors in interest reserved to itself, expressly or by implication, the minerals or the right to mine them.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS ss. 182-2 and 182-1 on 2026-08-02. Be exact about the scope, because the obvious reading is wrong in both directions. This is NOT a reservation of all minerals in the State as a general proposition; it reaches state lands and reserved lands. But it is not confined to public land either, because reserved lands are privately owned or leased land where a reservation already sits in the chain. The words to notice are OR BY IMPLICATION, which no other reservation on this record uses, and which means the question for a Hawaii owner is not what the statute says but what the instrument that first put their parcel in private hands said. State lands is defined to include all public and other lands owned or in the possession, use and control of the Territory or the State or any of its agencies. Subsection (b) is the same device Alaska and Washington use, a reservation the statute writes into every conveyance of state land, which makes three states on this record where the severance was done by statute rather than by private deed. WHAT IS NOT READ: the case the section's own notes name on the reservation being self-effectuating, 49 H. 429, 421 P.2d 570 (1966), and the companion note under s. 182-1 on the validity of a mineral reservation in a royal patent issued on a land commission award. No Hawaii decision was fetched, and how a private party severs minerals in Hawaii by ordinary deed was not read at all.

HRS s. 182-1, Definitions

Minerals is defined to mean any or all of oil, gas, coal, phosphate, sodium, sulphur, iron, titanium, gold, silver, bauxite, bauxitic clay, diaspore, boehmite, laterite, gibbsite, alumina and all ores of aluminum and, without limitation, all other mineral substances and ore deposits whether solid, gaseous or liquid, including all geothermal resources, in, on or under any land, fast or submerged. It expressly does not include sand, rock, gravel and other materials suitable for use and used in general construction. Geothermal resources is separately defined as the natural heat of the earth and the energy in whatever form below the surface present in, resulting from, created by, or extractable from that heat, together with minerals in solution and other products from naturally heated fluids, brines, associated gases and steam, but excluding oil and hydrocarbons and excluding anything from those fluids not used for electrical power generation.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS s. 182-1 on 2026-08-02. The exclusion is doing more work than the list. Construction aggregate is the great bulk of what is actually quarried in Hawaii, and it sits outside the State's reservation entirely, so the reservation reaches substances that are for the most part not being extracted while leaving alone the one that is. The geothermal definition is worth reading twice for its last clause: a product obtained from naturally heated fluids and NOT used for electrical power generation is excluded from geothermal resources, so what the substance is depends partly on what it is used for. Two other definitions in the same section carry weight elsewhere on this page. OCCUPIER, which is Hawaii's word for the person on top, means a person who owns the surface in fee or is entitled to possession under a certificate of occupation, a nine hundred and ninety-nine year homestead lease, a right of purchase lease, a cash freehold agreement or a general lease from the State, and their assignees. And FORCE MAJEURE is defined by the statute rather than left to the lease, its list including fire, explosion, flood, volcanic activity, seismic or tidal wave, war, riot, the elements, power shortages, strikes, and any cause which prevents the economic mining of the lease.

HRS s. 182-1, Definitions, and the chapter index of the Hawaii Revised Statutes

Nothing read for this record ends a Hawaii mineral interest because nobody used it. There is no dormant mineral act and no marketable record title act. So there is no period of inactivity to survive, no statement of claim that would preserve anything, and no notice of lapse for anyone to serve. What can still move a mineral interest in Hawaii is what can move one anywhere, a conveyance or a tax sale, together with the two things particular to this state: the State's own reservation, which does not lapse and which the board may release only where it judges a non-mining use of greater benefit, and registration of the land in the Land Court, which is the subject of the separate rule on this page.

Checked August 2, 2026. Established on 2026-08-02 by enumeration with controls and not by any search. The chapter index of the entire Hawaii Revised Statutes was fetched from the Legislature's own table of contents and parsed into chapter number and title pairs: 1,036 entries. The words DORMANT, SEVER and MARKETABLE appear in none of them. The controls are what make those zeros mean something: MINERAL appears exactly once, on chapter 182, and MINING appears exactly once, on chapter 181 Strip Mining, while ABANDON returns 2, CONVEY 4, OIL 5 (all of them soil, used oil or motor oil, none petroleum), GEOTHERM 1, PROPERTY 20, WATER 21, LAND 25 and TAX 32. Hawaii's own structure states the scope better than any count can: subtitle 3 of the statutes is titled MINING AND MINERALS and it contains two chapters, 181 and 182. Chapter 181, Strip Mining, was enumerated to section level, ten sections of permits, bonds, reclamation and penalties, and its section list contains no occurrence of surface owner, landowner, royalty, sever or dormant. THE LIMIT, and it is the same one every enumeration on this record has: this is a title-level count over the whole code plus a section-level read of the only subtitle about minerals, so it cannot exclude a provision inside a chapter whose title does not disclose it, and no Hawaii decision was read, so it says nothing about judge-made doctrine.

HRS s. 182-3, Bond; compensation to occupiers

Every mining lessee and every assignee must file a bond with the board, payable to the State, conditioned on faithful performance of the chapter and the lease and on full payment of all damages suffered by occupiers. Where the State sells or leases its mineral rights on land it or its predecessors granted or leased, and the land including any crops or improvements is damaged by mining or incidental operations, including exploratory work, or by the lessee's failure to restore the land properly after operations end, the occupier is to be reimbursed the full extent of the damages. On top of that the occupier may notify the board in writing, before or within thirty days after the public auction, that they elect to have the amount of damages AND the amount of rentals determined by arbitration with the successful bidder. The arbitrators must award what will fairly compensate the occupier for damage to crops, improvements, or the surface or condition of the land, and a reasonable rental for the use of the surface. Nothing in the section stops the occupier simply demanding rent from the lessee, or agreeing the damages directly.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS s. 182-3 on 2026-08-02, arbitration under chapter 658A. Two things separate this from the surface protections elsewhere on this record. It fixes the RENT and not only the damages, so the occupier is not merely compensated for harm, they are paid for the use of their land at a figure a neutral sets. And the initiative is theirs, on a deadline tied to the auction rather than to any notice the operator gives. Set it beside North Carolina, read the same day, where an arbitration clause in an oil and gas lease that has the effect of limiting access to the county superior court is void and unenforceable. The device is the same and its polarity is opposite: there arbitration is what the operator uses to keep the owner out of court, here it is what the owner elects. WHAT IS NOT READ: chapter 658A itself, who pays for the arbitration, and what happens where the occupier misses the thirty days. The allocation clause is also worth noticing, because the damages are to be allocated between the lessee and the fee owner in accordance with the lease terms if any, which means an occupier who is a tenant rather than the fee owner does not necessarily keep all of it.

HRS s. 182-5, Mining leases on reserved lands

On reserved lands, which is private land the State reserved under, any interested person may notify the board of a wish to apply for a mining lease, with a hundred dollar fee, a description and whatever maps the board's rules require. The board may grant that lease at public auction under section 182-4, or, by the vote of two thirds of the members to which the board is entitled, without any public auction to the occupier of the land. It may be granted to somebody other than the occupier only where the occupier has assigned their right to apply. And for geothermal the statute goes further: any provision to the contrary notwithstanding, where the board decides it is appropriate to grant a geothermal mining lease on reserved lands, the surface owner or the owner's assignee has the first right of refusal for the lease. If the occupier or their assignee does not apply within six months of notice that the board has found it in the public interest that the minerals be mined, the lease goes to auction, where bidders bid on an amount payable to the State for the right to exploit the minerals it reserved.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS s. 182-5 on 2026-08-02. Arizona is the other state on this record whose statute gives a surface owner first refusal over their own reserved minerals, and Hawaii's is the wider of the two: Arizona's attaches to a permit to EXPLORE, while Hawaii's attaches to the mining lease itself, which is the instrument that authorises production. Note also the route that does not need the refusal at all, because it may matter more: the board can hand the lease straight to the occupier without a public auction on a two thirds vote, which turns the person on top into the person holding the mineral lease. WHAT IS NOT READ: on what terms the first refusal is exercised, what price the occupier pays, how the surface owner is told a decision has been made, and what happens if they decline. Nor was anything read on how an occupier finds out whether their land is reserved land in the first place, which is the question that has to be answered before any of this applies.

HRS s. 182-4, Mining leases on state lands

On state lands, after a person applies and public notice runs weekly for three weeks in the county, the board must, after due notice of a public hearing to all parties in interest, determine whether the proposed mining operation or the existing or reasonably foreseeable future use of the land would be of greater benefit to the State. That is so whether or not the land is currently being put to some productive use. If the board decides the existing or foreseeable use is of greater benefit, it must disapprove the application without putting the land to auction at all. The board fixes the area offered and may modify the boundaries after a hearing. Bidders may then be required to bid on annual rental against an upset price, a royalty on gross proceeds or net profits, a cash bonus, or any combination the board sets. One protection runs to the person who found the mineral rather than to the landowner: a discoverer who explored under a permit, bid, and lost is to be reimbursed by the highest successful bidder for the direct and indirect costs of exploring the land, excluding salaries, attorney's fees and legal expenses.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS ss. 182-4 and 182-6 on 2026-08-02. This is a public-interest gate in front of the auction rather than a protection owed to any particular person, and it is the mechanism the release power in s. 182-2(a) points at. Two neighbouring sections belong with it. Section 182-6 requires anyone wanting to explore on state or reserved lands to hold a board permit, allows extraction only of what is reasonably required for testing and analysis, and requires all exploration data, including drill logs and assay results, to be turned over to the board and kept CONFIDENTIAL, with the confidentiality lapsing at the board's discretion if no lease application follows within six months. Section 182-15 lets the board reserve to the State the right to lease, sell or otherwise dispose of the surface of land inside a mining lease, subject to the mining lessee's rights. And s. 182-12 lets the State acquire rights-of-way for mining transportation and communication BY EMINENT DOMAIN and then assign, lease or transfer them to the person mining, which is the State condemning land so that a private operator can reach a deposit.

HRS s. 182-9.5, Unitization

On its own motion, or on the petition of any mining lessee, the board may in its discretion order lessees or owners of mineral rights on adjoining properties to collectively adopt and operate under a cooperative or unit plan of development. It may do so if it finds that the plan will prevent the waste of any mineral, increase the ultimate recovery, avoid the drilling, digging or excavating of an unnecessary well, or for any other reason that would encourage and promote the development of a mineral resource. The section is one sentence long and it says nothing else: no notice requirement, no hearing, no just and equitable share standard, no royalty for anybody, no cost-free fraction, no risk penalty, and no election for an owner who does not want to take part.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS s. 182-9.5 on 2026-08-02, and it is the whole section. What is absent is the finding. Every other pooling provision on this record either fixes a number or at least states a standard the order must satisfy: Florida carries a nonconsenting owner at three hundred per cent of costs, Washington at one hundred and fifty, Alabama guarantees three sixteenths free of every cost, North Dakota a cost-free royalty, and Arizona, Iowa and North Carolina at least require the order to afford each owner the opportunity to recover a just and equitable share without unnecessary expense. Hawaii states four purposes the board may act for and leaves everything else to the board's discretion. It is also the only unitization provision here that reaches OWNERS of mineral rights on adjoining properties rather than only lessees within a defined unit. Enacted in 1978 and never amended. WHAT IS NOT READ: any rule the board has made under s. 182-14 that might supply the missing terms, and whether any unit plan has ever been ordered.

HRS s. 502-83, Effect of not recording deeds, leases, etc.

All deeds, leases for a term of more than one year, mortgages of any interest in real estate and other conveyances of real estate in Hawaii must be recorded in the Bureau of Conveyances. There are no county recording offices. A conveyance not so recorded is void as against any subsequent purchaser, lessee or mortgagee in good faith and for a valuable consideration, not having actual notice of the conveyance of the same real estate or any interest in it, whose own conveyance is first duly recorded. Timing is by delivery: every instrument entitled to be recorded is recorded in the order and as of the time it is delivered to the registrar, and is considered recorded from that delivery. The registrar may not accept an instrument on a Sunday, a legal holiday or a closed Saturday, or on any other day except between eight in the morning and half past three in the afternoon, and may agree in writing with a person or association that an instrument be recorded at one minute past eight on a day after its delivery.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS ss. 502-83 and 502-32 on 2026-08-02, and at the Bureau of Conveyances' own page the same day. Both limbs are required, so this is race-notice: a later buyer must be in good faith, for value, without ACTUAL notice, AND first to record. The section's own case notes record that actual possession under an unrecorded deed is constructive notice defeating good faith, and that a later purchaser is not protected though in good faith unless the purchaser records first. The office is the thing most likely to waste a searcher's morning. The Bureau of Conveyances is a division of the Department of Land and Natural Resources and it serves the whole State; its page states it examines, records, indexes and digitises over 344,000 Regular System and Land Court documents and maps annually and issues Land Court certificates of title, and it claims Hawaii is one of two states in the nation with a single statewide recording system, which is the Bureau's claim rather than this record's finding. Alaska is the other state on this record without county recording, and its records sit with its own Department of Natural Resources. WHAT IS NOT READ: how the Bureau's indices are actually searched, and how far back the Regular System index reaches.

HRS s. 501-82, Tenure of holder of certificate of title

Hawaii runs a second system beside the Regular System, statewide: land registered in the Land Court under chapter 501, which is a Torrens system. Every applicant receiving a certificate of title under a decree of registration, and every subsequent purchaser of registered land who takes a certificate for value and in good faith, holds free from all encumbrances except those noted on the certificate in the order of priority of recordation, and except nine subsisting encumbrances the section lists: federal liens and rights the State cannot require to appear of record, unpaid real property taxes, state tax liens recorded in the Bureau of Conveyances, public highways and certain private ways, a lease coupled with occupancy for a term not exceeding one year, liability to assessments for betterments and certain statutory liabilities, the possibility of the decree being reversed on appeal, certain leasehold time share encumbrances, and recorded money judgments. None of the nine is a mineral interest.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS s. 501-82 on 2026-08-02, the section in full, 7,330 characters, containing zero occurrences of mineral, sever, oil, gas or geothermal, against controls of easement 2 and lien 11. This is the second state on this record with exactly this shape, and it stops in exactly the same place as the first. Minnesota's s. 508.25 lists seven exceptions, none of them a mineral interest, and the Minnesota page deliberately declines to conclude that registration cuts off a severed interest that was missed. So does this one, for the same reason: what has NOT been read is the registration proceeding itself, where the answer actually lives, because a decree follows notice and adjudication and a severed interest would ordinarily be noted on the certificate at registration. The live question is what happens to one that was not, and no Hawaii decision on it was read. What is worth knowing without any decision is that the two systems run side by side in one office, so a Hawaii searcher has to establish which system a parcel is in before the search means anything, and subsection (b) tells them what a sufficient notation looks like: a reference to a document by name or number plus an indication that the referenced document contains an encumbrance.

HRS s. 182-7, Lease

A mining lease runs for sixty-five years, or less at the board's discretion, and the payments to the State are fixed by the board subject to three provisos. For bauxite, bauxitic clay, gibbsite, diaspore, boehmite and all ores of aluminum, the royalty for each long dry ton of ore as beneficiated must be not less than twenty-five cents or the equivalent of the price of one pound of virgin pig aluminum, whichever is higher, and may not exceed the equivalent of the price of three pounds. Ore processed into aluminous oxide in the State pays eighty per cent of the rate for ore that is not. Otherwise the royalty is to be fixed at a rate that will tend to encourage the establishment and continuation of the mining industry in the State. Those royalties are declared to be in lieu of any severance or other similar tax on extracting, producing, winning, beneficiating, handling, storing, treating or transporting the mineral or anything it is processed into in the State, and they may not be reopened or renegotiated for the first twenty years of the lease term. Thirty per cent of all geothermal royalties the State receives go to the county where the operations are, and one hundred per cent goes to the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands where the resources are on its lands.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS s. 182-7 on 2026-08-02. Two things here are not on this record anywhere else. A royalty indexed to a commodity's market price rather than stated as a percentage or a rate per unit: the reference is the basic price on the mainland United States market for virgin pig aluminum, not refined, f.o.b. factory, and the statutory floor and ceiling are one pound and three pounds of it per long dry ton of ore. And a rate cut for processing in state, twenty per cent off for ore taken to aluminous oxide in Hawaii, which is industrial policy written into a royalty formula. The in-lieu clause is the reason this state's answer to the severance tax question is no. Other terms in the same section: the lessee must commence mining within three years, suspended while it is actively and substantially mining the same minerals on another of its leases; a research period may be fixed with a minimum expenditure, and the three years runs from its end; the lessee has exclusive possession of the leased minerals and may use so much of the surface as is reasonably required, subject to s. 182-3; and minerals separated incidentally may be retained subject to accounting for excise tax and any royalty the board sets. If the lessee wants to mine other minerals it must notify the board in writing first and the royalty is then negotiated. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether any mining lease is in force, and what any of them actually pays.

HRS s. 182-18, Geothermal royalties

The board fixes the payment of royalties to the State for the utilization of geothermal resources at a rate which will encourage the initial and continued production of those resources. With respect to all geothermal mining leases already issued or still to be issued, where the board determines it necessary to encourage initial or continued production, the board has authority to waive royalty payments to the State for any fixed period of time up to eight years. The basis on which the amount and duration are fixed or waived is set by rules, and the board's assessment of each application must include the progress of geothermal development in the State at the time, the technical and financial capability of the applicant, and the need to provide a financial incentive for the applicant to proceed. Favourable terms may be revoked if the applicant fails a condition or wholly ceases operations for reasons within the parties' control. The board reports all geothermal royalty dispositions to the legislature.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS s. 182-18 on 2026-08-02. There is no geothermal royalty rate in Hawaii statute at all, and that is the finding rather than a gap in the reading: the rate is administrative, its stated purpose is to encourage production rather than to price a public asset, and it can lawfully be zero for eight years. Read it against s. 182-7's requirement that the ordinary mining royalty be fixed at a rate tending to encourage the industry, and the same instinct is visible in both. The distributional rule in s. 182-7(c) is what makes the number matter to somebody other than the State: thirty per cent of geothermal royalties go to the county where the operations sit. An Attorney General opinion recorded in the notes to both sections says allocating royalties from geothermal developments on Department of Hawaiian Home Lands land to the board or to the counties would violate section 4 of the Admission Act and article XII of the Hawaii constitution, because those proceeds must be available to that department under the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act. Neither the opinion, the Act, the Admission Act nor the constitution was read for this record. WHAT IS NOT READ: the board's rules under subsection (b), and the reports to the legislature required by subsection (c), either of which would give an actual rate.

HRS s. 182-16, Levy and assessment of general excise tax

Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary, the levy and assessment of the general excise tax on the gross proceeds from any manner of sale of geothermal resources, or of electrical energy produced by the geothermal producer from those resources, is to be made only as a tax on the business of a producer, at the rate assessed producers. That rate is one half of one per cent of the gross proceeds of sales of the business, or of the value of the products for sale. The same paragraph of the tax law charges four per cent to a person in the business of selling tangible personal property generally, and one half of one per cent to a wholesaler, so geothermal is pinned to the bottom tier rather than the top one, and it is pinned there by a direction in the minerals chapter rather than by anything in the tax chapter.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS s. 182-16 on 2026-08-02, and the rate read at s. 237-13(2)(A) the same day rather than assumed. The words worth keeping are ONLY AS A TAX ON THE BUSINESS OF A PRODUCER: the general excise tax is a tax on the privilege of doing business measured by gross income, and it can otherwise apply at more than one point in a chain, so directing that these proceeds be taxed only at the producer level and only at the producer rate is a substantive protection and not merely a rate choice. It is not a severance tax and this page does not call it one. Its base is gross proceeds of sales, which reaches the money rather than the volume, and it is charged to the producer as a cost of doing business rather than deducted from anybody's royalty; nothing was read that says a Hawaii royalty owner bears any part of it, and nothing should be inferred either way. WHAT IS NOT READ: chapter 237 generally, including whether a royalty received by a landowner is itself gross income subject to the tax, which is a real question that this record cannot answer.