Tennessee mineral rights

T.C.A. § 66-5-108(c) and (b)(3)

Tennessee has a dormant mineral interests act and it is the plainest one on this record. T.C.A. 66-5-108(c) provides that any interest in coal, oil and gas, and other minerals, if unused for twenty years, is extinguished and the ownership reverts to the owner of the surface, unless a statement of claim has been filed. USE is defined in subsection (b)(3) and is deliberately wide: minerals being produced under the interest, operations for injection, withdrawal, storage or disposal of water, gas or other fluid substances, rentals or royalties being paid to the owner for delaying or enjoying the rights, any of those uses being carried out on any tract the interest is unitized or pooled with, or taxes being paid on the interest. Any one of them resets the clock, and the last of them carries a condition that is not in this section at all and is set out separately on this page. The statement of claim is the defence, it is cheap, and it does not expire on a schedule of its own: it must be filed before the end of the twenty year period, it goes to the register of deeds in the county where the land lies, and it has to give the name and address of the owner, cite the tax maps and parcel numbers for the surface owners above the mineral estate, and reference the instrument the interest is claimed under. Once filed it is prima facie evidence in any legal proceeding that the interest was in use on the day it was filed. The act cannot be waived at any time before the twenty years expire, subsection (i) and subsection (g) say so twice over, and it applies in all ways to property owned by the state.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 66-5-108 on the verbatim mirror, 12,975 characters, the whole section read end to end including the legislative findings in subsection (a) and the two printed court forms. The currency control was run separately against Tennessee's own bill record on capitol.tn.gov and is described in the caveats and gaps on this page.

T.C.A. § 66-5-108(e)

Reading subsection (c) alone would suggest a Tennessee mineral interest evaporates on the twentieth anniversary. It does not. Subsection (e) is the machinery, and it puts the whole burden on the person who wants the minerals. Only somebody who would succeed to the interest on its lapse, in practice the surface owner, can start it, and they start it by filing a complaint for claim of abandoned mineral interest with the clerk and master of the county where the interest is. The complaint is sworn, and the statute prints it out in full with the blanks in place, down to the notary block. It requires the plaintiff to state that after inquiring with the county property assessor they are aware of no tax being paid on the mineral estate, and that on reasonable inquiry they are aware of no use being made of it. The clerk and master then publishes notice once a week for three consecutive weeks in a newspaper of general circulation in the county, and sends a copy by certified mail within ten days after that publication to the mineral owner named in the complaint. The mineral owner has sixty days to file an answer alleging a claim. If an answer is filed the matter is contested and nothing lapses. If none is filed the clerk and master certifies that fact to the chancellor, who signs the order, and the statute prints that order out too. The filing fee is thirty dollars plus the cost of publication. For the lapse to bind subsequent interest holders a certified copy of the final order must be recorded with the register of deeds. No action to contest a lapse may be brought more than three years after the interest lapsed, and a court may award fees against a claim or complaint filed without reasonable inquiry, with no factual basis and to harass.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 66-5-108(e), on the verbatim mirror. Subsection (k)(2) is worth knowing from the other side: if the court finds no record of taxes paid and no statement of claim referencing the mineral estate by tax map and parcel number, the complaint is DEEMED to have been filed in good faith, so the fee shifting protection is narrow.

T.C.A. § 67-5-809(d), with § 67-5-804(b)

This is the rule most likely to cost a Tennessee mineral owner the interest, and it is not in the dormancy statute. T.C.A. 66-5-108(b)(3) lists payment of taxes as a use that keeps the twenty year clock at zero. T.C.A. 67-5-804(b), in the property tax title, separately requires ALL mineral owners to identify their mineral interests with the property assessor in the county where the interest lies, giving a deed reference number and specifying where the mineral estate lies by citing the tax maps and parcel numbers of the surface owners above it. Three ways of identifying it are accepted: by map and parcel number of the surface owners, by supplying reliable and accurate maps that the assessor keeps on file, or by giving the surface owners' names and enough further information for the assessor to locate the interest on the assessor's own maps. Then T.C.A. 67-5-809(d) closes the circuit. A mineral interest owner who has failed to identify the location of the interest as 67-5-804 requires may not claim payment of taxes as a use of the mineral interest under title 66 chapter 5. The consequence is that an owner who has faithfully paid Tennessee property tax on a mineral interest for twenty years, but never registered where it is, has not stopped the clock at all. There are money penalties in the same section as well: twenty five percent for failing to register within three years of 1 July 1987, and ten percent of the current assessment for an owner who is paying tax but has still not identified the location. Interests that had been registered and taxed through the current tax year on 1 July 1987 did not have to register again.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 67-5-809(d) and 67-5-804(b) on the verbatim mirror. These two sections were not found by searching the property title: T.C.A. 66-5-108(b) names 67-5-804(b), 67-5-809 and 67-5-2502(e) by number in its own opening words, which is what sent this record to them. The dormancy statute's own legislative findings in subsection (a)(2) explain why the link exists: the general assembly found that separated mineral estates were not properly registered and so were off the tax rolls.

T.C.A. § 66-5-110

Tennessee reversed the ordinary reading of a severance deed for anything contracted on or after 1 July 2011. T.C.A. 66-5-110 provides that where an owner of both the surface and the mineral rights contracts to convey mineral rights, so severing the two estates, the parties SHALL identify the specific mineral interests being conveyed, and the purchaser shall identify the interests purchased by giving a deed reference number under T.C.A. 67-5-804(c) to the property assessor of the county where they lie. Specific mineral interests is then defined to mean only those minerals listed in the deed as contemplated by the parties, and the section states flatly that all rights to minerals not described in the deed remain with the surface owner. That is the opposite of the usual result, where a grant of the minerals carries everything of that character whether or not anyone had it in mind, and it means a modern Tennessee grantee who wrote coal and did not write oil and gas got coal. The section is prospective and says so: it applies to contracts entered into on or after 1 July 2011, does not impair the obligation of any existing contract, and is not to be construed to direct courts in determining the intent of parties who contracted before that date. So the older the deed, the less this helps, and for a pre 2011 deed the ordinary rules of construction still govern.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 66-5-110 on the verbatim mirror. Chapter 5 of Title 66 was walked end to end through the mirror's own Previous and Next chain rather than enumerated from an index, which is how this section was reached at all: it sits two sections after the dormancy act and nothing about its catchline would send a reader to it.

T.C.A. § 66-5-102

T.C.A. 66-5-102 is Tennessee's answer to the broad form deed, the old instrument that severed the minerals in general terms and was later read to permit methods nobody had imagined when it was signed. Where an instrument purporting to sever the surface and mineral estates does not describe the manner or method of extraction in express and specific terms, the section presumes the parties intended the minerals to be extracted only in the principal manner and method prevailing in this state at the time the instrument was executed. For a deed signed when coal was mined underground, that presumption points away from stripping the surface off. It is a presumption and not a bar: subsection (b) says the section is not intended to exclude evidence that would otherwise be admissible to show the intentions of the parties, so a party with better evidence of what was meant can still put it in. The limit is the important part and it is easy to miss because it is the last line of the section. Subsection (c) provides that the section applies only to mineral estates in COAL. A Tennessee severance deed silent about method conveying oil and gas, or limestone, or anything else, gets no help from this section at all.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 66-5-102 on the verbatim mirror. The quote chosen is subsection (c) rather than the operative presumption in subsection (a), because the presumption is the part a reader will already have heard about and the coal limit is the part that decides whether it applies to them. Subsection (a) is set out in full in the summary.

T.C.A. § 60-1-301

T.C.A. 60-1-301 levies a severance tax on all gas and oil removed from the ground in Tennessee, measured at three percent of the sale price. It is not in the tax title. Title 67 chapter 7 is named Severance Taxes and reaches only coal and aggregate, and the aggregate definition at 67-7-202(a) expressly excludes any mineral taxed under 60-1-301, which is the code confirming the split in its own words. The tax is collected by withholding rather than by billing the owner. Everyone actually engaged in severing oil or gas, and everyone actually operating oil or gas property under a contract requiring direct payments to the holders of a royalty, excess royalty or working interest, is liable, and must withhold the tax from the amount due before making the payment. A Tennessee royalty owner therefore pays it without ever receiving a demand for it. One third of what is collected goes to the county that was the site of the wellhead and the remaining two thirds to the state general fund. Subsection (c) then does something Georgia's equivalent does not: it bars any other tax on that gas and oil by the state, by counties or by any other political subdivision, so there is no local option layer to check county by county. Two carve outs sit in the same subsection. Free gas used by the property owner or tenant under the terms of the lease is not taxed unless it is in lieu of a cash payment, and gas injected into the ground for underground storage and later withdrawn is not subject to this or any taxation. Returns and payment are monthly, due by the twentieth, reporting oil for the preceding month and gas for the second preceding month.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 60-1-301 and 60-1-302 on the verbatim mirror, reached by walking chapter 1 of Title 60 end to end rather than by enumerating the tax title. Enumerating the tax title is exactly how this record nearly published a false negative about Georgia's severance tax a day earlier, and Tennessee is the second state running where the oil and gas tax is not in the title named after taxes.

T.C.A. § 60-1-209

Tennessee gives the surface owner a statutory place in the permitting of a well, which is more than most states on this record do. Under T.C.A. 60-1-209 the applicant must, no later than the filing of the permit application and before initiating ANY site preparation, give notice by certified mail with return receipt to the owners of the surface of the land to be drilled or affected. The owners entitled to notice are those of record in the property tax assessor's office. The notice has to set out the proposed well site, all new ingress and egress, the location of diversions, drilling pits, dikes and related structures, proposed storage tanks and all other surface disturbances, and it has to tell the owner that they have fifteen working days from mailing to discuss where those disturbances go and that either side may request a hearing in writing if they cannot agree. The hearing is a contested case under the Uniform Administrative Procedures Act before the supervisor or a designee sitting alone, it must be held within ten working days of the request AND in the county of the proposed well, and the decision comes within ten calendar days and is a final order not subject to further agency review. The gate is subsection (c): notwithstanding any other permit requirement, a permit may only issue if the applicant files statements of no objection signed by every owner entitled to notice, or no hearing was requested, or a final order has issued. It is not a veto, because the hearing officer decides. It is a guaranteed hearing, close to home, before anything is dug.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 60-1-209 on the verbatim mirror. Chapter 1 of Title 60 was walked end to end through the Previous and Next chain, twenty nine sections across all five parts. The stated purpose of the hearing, in the statute's own words, is to minimize the impact of the proposed drilling operation on the surface of the land.

T.C.A. § 60-1-202(a)(4)(M) to (O)read from FindLaw Codes, Tennessee Code 60-1-202, current as of January 2, 2024

Tennessee has compulsory pooling and unitization, and a reader looking for the usual apparatus of applications, hearings, elections and risk penalties will not find it in the code, because the general assembly wrote the authority and left the scheme to the regulator. T.C.A. 60-1-202(a)(4) is a list of purposes for which the Tennessee board of water quality, oil and gas may make rules, regulations and orders, and three items in that list carry the whole subject. Subdivision (M) empowers the board to provide for the forced integration of separately owned tracts and other property ownership into drilling and production units. Subdivision (N) empowers the board to provide that it may, in the absence of a voluntary agreement and after a sixty day notice to owners, force a volumetric or surface poolwide unit, but only where the pool producers owning more than fifty percent of the pool acreage have requested that unitization. Subdivision (O) lets the board shut in a pool, to prevent waste and protect correlative rights, until the operators present an acceptable plan of unitization. So the two numbers a Tennessee owner would want, the sixty day notice and the more than fifty percent of pool acreage that has to ask, are stated in the code, but they are stated as conditions on a rulemaking power. What an owner is actually served with, what they may elect, and how their share is calculated are matters of the board's rules and orders, which were not read for this page. The same subsection also caps the plugging and reclamation bond at fifteen thousand dollars per single well site, with the plugging portion no more than ten thousand dollars per well where a site has more than one.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 60-1-202(a)(4)(M), (N) and (O) on the verbatim mirror. Chapter 1 of Title 60 was walked end to end, twenty nine sections, and there is no separate pooling or unitization section anywhere in it; these three subdivisions of the board's jurisdiction section are the entirety of what the chapter says on the subject.

T.C.A. § 66-26-105, with §§ 66-26-101 to 66-26-104

Tennessee is a race notice state and the timing hook is unusually precise. T.C.A. 66-26-105 gives an instrument first registered, or first noted for registration, preference over one of earlier date that was noted for registration afterwards, unless it is proved in a court of equity that the party claiming under the later instrument had full notice of the earlier one. So winning the race is not enough if you knew. The moment that counts is the NOTING FOR REGISTRATION rather than the date on the instrument or the day the register gets round to transcribing it: T.C.A. 66-26-102 provides that registered instruments are notice to all the world from the time they are noted for registration and take effect from that time. Around those two sections sit the consequences of not recording. T.C.A. 66-26-101 makes an instrument good between the parties and their heirs and representatives without any registration at all, but as to everyone else without actual notice only from the noting for registration. T.C.A. 66-26-103 makes an unregistered instrument null and void as against existing or subsequent creditors of, or bona fide purchasers from, the maker without notice. And T.C.A. 66-26-104 adds a trap with a clock on it: an instrument entitled to registration that is not registered within sixty days following the death of its maker is null and void as against innocent purchasers for present valuable consideration from the people who would have taken the property but for that instrument, leaving the holder only a damages action against the transferor.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 66-26-101 through 66-26-105 on the verbatim mirror, chapter 26 of Title 66 walked end to end through the mirror's Previous and Next chain, sixteen sections. Chapter 26 is called Effect of Authentication and Registration; the list of what may be registered is in chapter 24 and the acknowledgment rules are in chapter 22.

T.C.A. § 67-5-804(b), with § 67-5-809

Tennessee runs two separate registers that a mineral owner has to appear in, and appearing in the familiar one does not put you in the other. The register of deeds holds the instruments, and under T.C.A. 66-5-108(f) also keeps a book called the Dormant Mineral Interest Record for statements of claim and lapse orders. Separately, T.C.A. 67-5-804(b) requires all mineral owners to identify their mineral interests with the PROPERTY ASSESSOR of the county where the interest is located, supplying a deed reference number and specifying where the mineral estate lies by citing the tax maps and parcel numbers of the surface owners above it. The state board of equalization is required to furnish assessors a form for mineral owners to use. This is not a formality: T.C.A. 67-5-809(b) subjects a mineral owner who failed to register within three years of 1 July 1987 to back assessment or reassessment and a penalty of twenty five percent, and 67-5-809(c) levies a ten percent penalty on the current assessment of an owner who is paying tax but has not identified the location. There is one relieving provision worth knowing. Under 67-5-809(a), if the tax collector has not previously given notice to the owner of a dormant mineral interest that the interest was being assessed, there is no back assessment, and the owner is liable only for taxes accruing after 1 July 1987.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 67-5-804(b) and 67-5-809 on the verbatim mirror. This rule and the dormancy trap on this page are two faces of the same requirement, and they are stated separately on purpose, because an owner can care about the penalties without knowing the interest is at risk and can care about the risk without ever having been penalised.

T.C.A. § 66-29-105(a)(14), with § 66-29-102(16) and (24)

Money owed to a Tennessee mineral owner and not collected does not stay with the operator. Under the state's unclaimed property act, T.C.A. 66-29-102(24) includes MINERAL PROCEEDS in the definition of property, and T.C.A. 66-29-102(16) defines mineral proceeds very widely: amounts payable for the acquisition and retention of a mineral lease, expressly including a bonus, royalty, compensatory royalty, shut in royalty, minimum royalty and delay rental; amounts payable for extraction, production or sale, expressly including a net revenue interest, royalty, overriding royalty, extraction payment and production payment; and amounts payable under an agreement or option, expressly including a joint operating agreement, unit agreement, pooling agreement and farmout agreement. What Tennessee does NOT do is give mineral proceeds a period of their own. The act sets specific periods for travellers cheques, money orders, bonds, deposits, insurance, retirement accounts, safe deposit boxes, stored value cards and securities, and none of those provisions reaches minerals. Mineral proceeds therefore fall to the residual clause at T.C.A. 66-29-105(a)(14), which presumes all other property abandoned at the earlier of three years after the owner first has a right to demand it or three years after the obligation to pay or distribute it arises. Three years is short by the standards of this record. It also runs from the right to demand rather than from any contact with the owner, so an operator holding a suspended royalty for an owner it cannot find is on a clock that started when the money became payable.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 66-29-102 and 66-29-105 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 29 of Title 66 walked through the mirror's Previous and Next chain. The negative that mineral proceeds have no period of their own was checked by reading each of the six sections the residual clause names: 66-29-106 and 66-29-107 are retirement and other tax deferred accounts, 66-29-108 is accounts under title 35 chapter 7, 66-29-109 is safe deposit boxes, 66-29-110 is stored value cards and 66-29-111 is securities. The words mineral and minerals appear in the whole chapter only inside the definitions section.