New York mineral rights

N.Y. Envtl. Conserv. Law § 23-0901

Where on issuing a well permit the well operator does not control all owners within the spacing unit, by lease or voluntary agreement, the department must schedule an integration hearing, and the operator must give actual notice to every uncontrolled owner at least thirty days beforehand plus notice by publication, together with its estimate of the well costs each owner electing to participate would have to pay. Each owner then falls into one of three categories. A participating owner pays its proportionate share of well costs. A non-participating owner elects to reimburse the operator out of production proceeds for its share of the actual well costs of the initial well and takes a risk penalty, receiving its full share of production once the operator has recouped. An integrated royalty owner is one who elects that status or who does not elect either of the others. The integrated royalty owner receives a royalty equal to the lowest royalty in an existing lease in the spacing unit, but no less than one eighth. That owner has no obligation to the well operator or any other owner for any charges, taxes or fees associated with operating the well, and, notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, is not liable by reason of that status for any claim for personal injury or property damage suffered by any person relating to the drilling and operation of the well.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 23-0901 of the Environmental Conservation Law. Three states on this record answer the question of what happens to a mineral owner who will not or cannot sign, and their answers are worth setting side by side because the money is not the whole of it. West Virginia gives a non-consenting cotenant the HIGHEST royalty percentage paid to any consenting cotenant in the tract, free of post-production expenses. North Dakota guarantees a force pooled owner who never leased a cost-free royalty. New York gives the LOWEST royalty in an existing lease in the spacing unit, with a one eighth floor, which is the least generous of the three on rate. What New York adds is something neither of the others has: the quoted sentence, which is a statutory immunity. A New York owner who is swept into a unit and does nothing is not merely free of well costs, taxes and fees; they cannot be sued for personal injury or property damage arising from the drilling and operation of a well they had no hand in. That is a real answer to a real fear, and it is the reason to read the definitions subdivision rather than only the rate. Note also the default itself: doing nothing does not forfeit anything, it selects the royalty option. WHAT IS NOT READ: the risk penalty percentage and how it is set, and the notice and hearing machinery in the rest of the section, which runs to twenty five thousand characters.

N.Y. Envtl. Conserv. Law § 23-0301

Nothing read for this record lapses, extinguishes or reverts a severed New York mineral interest for non use. There is no dormant mineral act among the articles of the Real Property Law or the Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law, and none among the sections of the Environmental Conservation Law article that governs mineral resources. There is no period of inactivity to survive, no statement of claim or notice of intent to preserve to record, and no notice of lapse for a surface owner to file. What New York legislates about instead is what happens when a well is drilled over land whose owners have not all signed, and what may not be drilled at all.

Checked July 31, 2026. THE INSTRUMENT BEHIND THIS NEGATIVE, and its limits, which are real and are stated rather than glossed. Three bodies of law were enumerated on the Senate's own site. The article of the Environmental Conservation Law headed Mineral Resources was enumerated to SECTION level across all thirteen of its titles: 56 sections. Neither "dormant" nor "lapse" appears in any of those 56 headings, and neither does "tax". The Real Property Law and the Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law were enumerated to ARTICLE level only: 26 and 27 article headings, 53 in all. None contains "dormant", "lapse", "mineral" or "marketable"; the single heading containing "abandon" is about abandoned manufactured homes. THAT IS A WEAKER INSTRUMENT than the section-level enumerations this record has run for other states, and it is weaker in a specific way: a dormancy provision sitting inside an article whose heading does not mention minerals would not be caught. The two articles where such a thing would most plausibly sit were identified and neither is one: Real Property article 9 is Recording Instruments Affecting Real Property, and Real Property Actions article 15 is the Action to Compel the Determination of a Claim to Real Property, which is New York's quiet title vehicle rather than a lapse statute. WHAT THIS CANNOT EXCLUDE, beyond the above: any judge-made doctrine, since nothing was fetched from a New York court.

N.Y. Envtl. Conserv. Law § 23-0501

No permits shall be issued authorising an applicant to drill, deepen, plug back or convert wells that use high volume hydraulic fracturing or carbon dioxide to complete or recomplete natural gas or oil resources. For the purposes of the section, high volume hydraulic fracturing is defined as the stimulation of a well using three hundred thousand or more gallons of water as the base fluid for hydraulic fracturing for all stages in a well completion, regardless of whether the well is vertical or directional, including horizontal. Separately there is a moratorium on the department acting on applications filed after the effective date of the 2020 chapter that added the subdivision, to drill, deepen, plug back or convert wells using gelled propane hydraulic fracturing, until the department completes an analysis of the potential impacts of gelled propane fracturing and makes the analysis publicly available. The same section also conditions a permit where the applicant does not control the oil or gas rights in the target formation: the department issues a permit conditional on the applicant completing the integration process before it may exercise the right to drill.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 23-0501 of the Environmental Conservation Law. This is on the surface use topic because it is the most consequential thing New York law says about what may be done to land above a mineral estate, and because its practical effect is the reason a great many New York mineral owners find their interest unleasable. Three things about it are worth separating. The prohibition is a permit bar rather than a ban on the activity in the abstract, which is why it sits in the well permit section. It is quantified rather than left to judgment: three hundred thousand gallons or more of water as the base fluid across all stages, and the definition expressly reaches vertical wells as well as directional and horizontal ones, so it cannot be avoided by drilling straight down. The carbon dioxide limb reads as a later addition to the same sentence, and it is the kind of amendment a legislature makes when a technique is proposed that a water-based definition would not reach; the amendment note giving its date was not read, so no date is stated for it here. The gelled propane moratorium is drafted differently again, as a pause on the department acting rather than a bar on issuing, and it lasts until an analysis is published. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether that analysis has been completed and published, which decides whether the propane moratorium still bites, and any decision applying any of this.

N.Y. Envtl. Conserv. Law § 23-1901

The title imposing the oil, gas and solution mining regulation and reclamation fees supersedes all other laws enacted by local governments or agencies concerning the imposition of a fee relating to circumstances described in that title. The same subdivision then says that nothing in the preceding sentence or in the title is to be construed as superseding or in any way limiting the right of any local government to impose real property taxes pursuant to the real property tax law. The title also provides that the United States and its agencies, the state of New York and its agencies, and local agencies are not subject to the fees it imposes, except that agencies are subject to them when they produce oil or gas or engage in solution mining.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 23-1901 of the Environmental Conservation Law. This is a narrow supersession clause and the narrowness is the finding. It reaches local laws about imposing a FEE relating to the circumstances the title describes, and it then goes out of its way to preserve local real property taxation. What it does not say, on its face and in this section, is anything about local land use control over where a well may go. That distinction has been the central question of New York oil and gas law for more than a decade, and this record is deliberately not resolving it here: what is published is what the section says, and what a court has made of it is not, because nothing was fetched from a New York court. Compare the states that legislate expressly on the point. Alaska pre-empts local taxation of the oil and gas itself while leaving income and franchise taxes alone. Louisiana forbids any parish from levying a severance tax outright. Pennsylvania runs the other way and lets a county elect to impose the only charge there is. New York removes the local fee power and hands back the property tax power in the same breath.

N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 291

A conveyance of real property within the state, once duly acknowledged or proved and certified, may be recorded in the office of the clerk of the county where the property is, and the county clerk or city registrar must record it on request of any party on tender of the lawful fees. Every such conveyance not so recorded is void as against any person who subsequently purchases, or acquires by exchange, or contracts to purchase or acquire by exchange, the same real property or any portion of it, or acquires by assignment the rent to accrue from it, in good faith and for a valuable consideration, from the same vendor or assignor or their distributees or devisees, and whose conveyance, contract or assignment is first duly recorded. It is likewise void against the lien arising from payments made on execution of or pursuant to a contract with the same vendor, where that contract is made in good faith and first duly recorded. The section also directs that where a conveyance of residential real property is recorded, the clerk of the county or the city registrar must mail a written notice of the conveyance to the owner of record, with a heading printed in twenty point bold type.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 291 of the Real Property Law. This is the race-notice shape, the same as Colorado, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, California and Wyoming: the later claimant must be in good faith, must have given value, and must have recorded first. Kansas and Texas ask only about notice, Louisiana asks about neither. Two New York particulars are worth carrying. The section protects a contract vendee and an assignee of rents alongside a purchaser, so the class of people an unrecorded instrument loses to is wider than the usual formulation. And the mailing duty at the end has no equivalent anywhere else on this record: when a conveyance of RESIDENTIAL real property is recorded, the clerk must post a written notice of it to the owner of record, in a form whose heading the statute specifies down to the point size. That is an anti-fraud measure aimed at forged deeds, and while it does not reach a mineral conveyance as such, it tells you something about how New York thinks about the record. WHAT IS NOT READ: section 294-a on assignment of rents, which the quoted text cross-refers to, and any New York decision applying section 291.

N.Y. Envtl. Conserv. Law § 23-1903

Nothing read for this record levies a severance or production tax on oil, gas or minerals in New York. What the mineral resources article imposes instead is a one off fee payable when the department grants a permit to drill a well, or when a person converts a well to one subject to the oil, gas and solution mining law. It has two components: a one hundred dollar fee credited to the oil and gas account, and a fee set by the depth drilled or expected to be drilled, on a published ladder that begins at one hundred and ninety dollars for a well of five hundred feet or less and rises in steps of one hundred and ninety dollars for each further five hundred feet, so that a well of five thousand feet carries one thousand nine hundred dollars. The charge is triggered by the permit rather than by production, so it does not vary with what the well makes, with the price of what it makes, or with who owns the interest.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 23-1903 of the Environmental Conservation Law, with the negative established as follows. The contents of the New York Tax Law were enumerated on the Senate's own site and hold 66 articles. Not one of them imposes a tax on the severance or production of oil, gas or minerals: the words "sever", "oil", "gas", "mineral" and "production" appear in none of the 66 article headings. The nearest is article 13-A, Tax On Petroleum Businesses, which by its title is a tax on businesses rather than on severance and which this record has NOT read, so nothing is claimed about what it reaches. Separately, none of the 56 section headings in the mineral resources article of the Environmental Conservation Law contains the word "tax". So the shape of the New York answer is this: no production tax, and a permit fee that is a function of depth. Pennsylvania is the only other state on this record with no charge measured on the value or volume of production, and the two are not the same: Pennsylvania charges a recurring flat fee per well that a county elects to impose, while New York charges once, at the permit, and scales it by how far down the well goes. WHAT IS NOT READ: article 13-A, local real property taxation of oil and gas interests, and whether the fee ladder has been amended since the text read here.