What are mineral rights?

Alabama Code § 40-7-16

Mineral, coal, oil, gas, timber and turpentine interests, when they have been so severed in ownership from the soil or trees, by sale or otherwise, are separately returned for assessment, and the return must show the land in or on which the interest is located. If the surface right only is assessed the description may be marked S.R., and if the mineral interest only is assessed it may be marked M.R., or carry another notation showing the nature of the interest and the acreage it covers. Separately, a documentary tax called the mineral documentary tax is levied on the filing and recording of every lease or other writing creating a leasehold interest in nonproducing oil, gas or other minerals, on every assignment or extension of one beyond its primary term, and on every deed or other writing by which any interest in or right to receive royalty from nonproducing minerals is conveyed to a grantee, or excepted or reserved to a grantor separately and apart from the surface. The amount runs off the length of the primary term: five cents per mineral or royalty acre where the term expires in ten years or less, ten cents where it runs more than ten and not more than twenty years, and fifteen cents where it may run beyond twenty years, with a minimum of one dollar. It is paid to the probate judge of the county where the land lies, who stamps the amount on the face of the instrument and notes it on the record.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 40-7-16 and 40-20-31 to 40-20-34 of the Code of Alabama. Two things here are worth separating from the ordinary. The first is that Alabama's assessment statute names the severance in the machinery itself rather than leaving it to case law: the letters M.R. and S.R. exist because a county assessor is expected to carry two owners for one description. The second is that the mineral documentary tax is levied on the ACT of severing or leasing, not on production and not on value. It is charged per mineral or royalty acre and the rate turns only on how long the primary term runs, so a long lease costs three times a short one and a hundred acres costs a hundred times an acre, whatever the minerals are worth. That design is the reason the exemption in the next rule works: Alabama has already collected something at the moment of severance, so it does not need to keep collecting every year. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether any Alabama decision has construed the mineral documentary tax, and section 40-20-37 beyond how the money is split.

Alabama Code § 9-17-161

The ownership of pore space in all strata below the surface lands and waters of the state is vested in the owners of the surface rights above, unless the pore space has previously been severed from the surface ownership or is explicitly excluded or reserved in a conveyance, and a conveyance of the surface carries the pore space on the same terms. The section then says something the other pore space statutes on this record do not: no previous agreement conveying or reserving oil, gas or other mineral interests acts to convey or reserve ownership of any pore space or carbon dioxide storage rights unless the agreement explicitly conveys or reserves subsurface space to be used for the geologic storage or sequestration of carbon dioxide. An agreement conveying the right to use a storage facility or pore space may not convey any other real property right, including oil, gas or other minerals, in the same instrument, and one that does is void, except for agreements executed before October 1, 2024. A storage operator must make a good faith effort to obtain the consent of all owners of a storage facility's pore space and storage rights, must obtain the consent of owners of not less than sixty six and two thirds percent of them, and may then ask the board to amalgamate and pool the nonconsenting owners in on just and reasonable terms, with all nonconsenting owners fairly and equitably compensated. An operator seeking to operate in the Blue Creek or Mary Lee coal seams in Jefferson, Tuscaloosa or Walker counties, or within a ten mile radius of any coal mine operation, must obtain the written consent of the coal mine operator and mineral owner, which may not be unreasonably withheld or delayed.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 9-17-161 and 9-17-162, enacted by Act 2024-325. This record now holds three answers to the pore space question and they are not the same answer. Utah vests title in the surface owner and then says the section neither increases nor diminishes any existing property right, which leaves the collision with an existing severed mineral estate to be argued. Nebraska approaches it from the other side, treating use of the pore space as a use that keeps a severed mineral interest alive. Alabama vests it in the surface owner and then settles the argument the Utah saving clause leaves open, in subsection (c), by declaring that an earlier mineral reservation did not carry it unless it said so in terms about carbon dioxide storage. For an Alabama mineral owner that is a loss stated plainly rather than left to litigation. The coal seam consent in section 9-17-162(7) is the other thing to notice: three named counties and two named seams get a veto in the statute itself, which is what a legislature does when the coal industry and the storage industry are both in the room. WHAT IS NOT READ: the rest of the carbon storage division at sections 9-17-150 to 9-17-166 beyond these two sections, including how compensation for a pooled nonconsenting owner is fixed, and section 9-17-153 on property rights in an underground gas storage reservoir.

AS 38.05.125

Each contract for the sale, lease or grant of state land, and each deed to state land, properties or interest in state land made under the enumerated provisions, is subject to a reservation the statute writes out in full. The state expressly saves, excepts and reserves to itself, its lessees, successors and assigns forever all oils, gases, coal, ores, minerals, fissionable materials, geothermal resources and fossils of every name, kind or description in or upon the land, together with the right to explore for them; the right to enter the land at any and all times to open, develop, drill and work mines or wells on that or other land and take the substances away; and the right to erect and use buildings, machinery, roads, pipelines, powerlines and railroads, sink shafts, drill wells, remove soil, and occupy as much of the land as may be necessary or convenient for those purposes. It closes by reserving generally all rights and power over the land, whether expressed or not, reasonably necessary or convenient to the complete enjoyment of what is reserved. The reservation does not apply to a quitclaim or a transfer under one named subsection, and the transfer of University of Alaska trust land to the Board of Regents carried the mineral estate with it.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 38.05.125. This is why Alaska belongs on a site about severed mineral rights even though it looks at first like a state where the question does not arise. Everywhere else on this record the split between surface and minerals was made by private parties, one deed at a time, and the reader's job is to find the instrument that did it. In Alaska the legislature did it wholesale and printed the operative words in the statute book: every conveyance of state land carries this reservation whether or not anyone reads the deed. So an Alaska landowner asking "do I own the minerals under my land" is usually asking a question with a statutory answer rather than a title-search answer, and where the chain runs back to a state disposal the answer is usually no. Note how far the reservation reaches beyond the substances: it reserves the right to enter, to build roads and pipelines and railroads, to occupy as much of the land as is convenient, and then adds a sweep clause for anything not expressed. That is the dominance of the mineral estate written down rather than left to case law. WHAT IS NOT READ: the enumerated provisions the reservation applies to, one by one; AS 38.50.050, which the section excepts; and how a federal or Native corporation conveyance is treated, which is a different chain entirely.

A.R.S. s. 37-231, State lands subject to sale; rights reserved in lands sold

Arizona severed the minerals under its own land by statute, and unlike the other statutory severances on this record it did not do it the same way throughout. Land sold between 9 July 1954 and 18 March 1968 carries a reservation to the state of an undivided one sixteenth of all oil, gases and other hydrocarbon substances, coal or stone, metals, minerals, fossils and fertilizer, together with uranium, thorium and anything else peculiarly essential to the production of fissionable materials. Land sold after 18 March 1968 is reserved entirely: all of those substances and the exclusive right to them remain retained by the state, except common variety minerals. And land known to contain any of those substances in paying quantities, or adjoining producing wells or land known to contain them, may not be sold at all.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at A.R.S. s. 37-231, subsections (C), (D) and (E), on 2026-08-01. The middle band is the interesting one and it is drafted as a bargain rather than as a taking. To promote the sale of state lands and the more active cooperation of the owner of the soil, the state constitutes the purchaser ITS OWN AGENT for the purposes of the section and relinquishes and vests in them an undivided fifteen sixteenths of all oil and gas. The purchaser may then sell or lease the minerals on whatever terms they think best, provided the state is paid its one sixteenth of the mineral produced or its value at the well or mine as the state land department determines. The same subsection imposes an offset drilling duty: on a discovery in paying quantities on adjoining land the purchaser or their lessee must drill what is needed to stop drainage, and if they do not, the state may enter and drill three months after written demand. Two limits worth stating. Subsection (C) is expressly confined to sales between the two dates and nothing was read about patents earlier than 9 July 1954. And how much the post-1968 reservation actually leaves a buyer turns on what common variety minerals means under s. 27-271, which was not read.

Ark. Code Ann. § 18-12-105, with §§ 18-12-601 and 18-12-201

Arkansas has no statute that tells a court how to read a mineral severance deed, and that absence is itself the answer, because the general conveyancing rule then governs and it runs the opposite way from the newest legislation on this record. Ark. Code 18-12-105 provides that the word heirs and other words of inheritance are not necessary to create or convey a fee simple, and that ALL deeds shall be construed to convey a complete estate of inheritance in fee simple unless expressly limited by appropriate words in the deed. So an Arkansas instrument granting or reserving the minerals carries the whole mineral fee, of whatever the minerals turn out to be, unless the deed itself cuts it down. Compare Tennessee, where for any contract on or after 1 July 2011 the parties must name the specific minerals and everything not described stays with the surface owner. Arkansas puts the burden the other way round: what is not expressly limited is conveyed. Two neighbouring sections matter to the same reader. Ark. Code 18-12-601 is the after-acquired title rule, so where somebody conveys land in fee simple absolute, or any lesser estate, without holding the legal estate at the time and acquires it afterwards, the estate passes to the grantee immediately and the conveyance is as valid as if the grantor had held it all along, which is what rescues a mineral deed given by an heir before the estate was settled. And Ark. Code 18-12-201 requires every deed or other instrument for the conveyance of real estate, or by which real estate may be affected in law or equity, to be proved or duly acknowledged before it may be admitted to record at all. Chapter 12 of Title 18 was walked end to end, thirty-eight sections; the word mineral appears in it three times and never in a construction rule, only in the dower, curtesy and homestead provisions and in the beneficiary deed section.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 18-12-105 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 12 of Title 18 walked through the Previous and Next chain, thirty-eight sections. The negative that Arkansas has no mineral-specific severance deed construction statute rests on that end-to-end read and on each of the three appearances of the word mineral being read in place, not on a search of the chapter.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-73-201

This is the provision most likely to be worth money to an Arkansas lessor, and most leases do not mention it because it does not have to be in the lease. Ark. Code 15-73-201(a)(1) provides that the term of an oil and gas lease extended by activities on lands in one section or pooling unit, whether the unit was established by rule, by order of the Oil and Gas Commission, or by the lease itself, shall NOT be extended to sections or pooling units under the lease where there has been no activity. In the ordinary law of oil and gas a single producing well anywhere on the leased land holds the entire lease indefinitely, which is why lessors negotiate for a Pugh clause. Arkansas supplies one by statute. The parties may still contract out, but only in a particular way: subsection (a)(2) permits a continuous drilling provision extending the term to additional lands only if the lessor's waiver of the right to terminate the lease as to the lands, sections or units where no activity has occurred is fully set forth in the lease or another agreement IN BOLD, ENLARGED, OR OTHER DISTINCTIVE PRINT. A waiver buried in ordinary type does not satisfy the section on its face. Subsection (b) adds a separate limit for the unregulated case: after the primary term, in an uncontrolled oil field with no spacing requirements, a producing well holds a maximum of one governmental quarter-quarter section as a production unit, which is forty acres.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-73-201 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 73 of Title 15 walked end to end through the Previous and Next chain, twenty-five sections across three subchapters. The chapter has no subchapter 1: 15-73-101 was fetched and is the host's not-found page, so the chapter genuinely begins at 15-73-201.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-73-207

Most states leave the implied covenants of an oil and gas lease to their courts. Arkansas has written the answer down, and it cuts in both directions in three lines. Ark. Code 15-73-207(a) states flatly that a mineral lessee under an oil and gas lease does not owe a fiduciary duty or a fiduciary obligation to the mineral lessor. That closes off the most demanding standard a lessor might argue for, and it matters, because a fiduciary would have to prefer the lessor's interest to their own. Subsection (b) then sets what is owed instead: the mineral lessee SHALL perform the covenants of the lease in good faith, and SHALL develop and operate the leased mineral estate as a prudent operator for the mutual benefit of the mineral lessor and mineral lessee. The phrase to hold on to is mutual benefit. It means the operator may not treat the lease purely as its own asset, and that decisions about developing, producing and marketing have to take the lessor's return into account as well as the operator's costs, but it stops short of requiring self-sacrifice. Read alongside Ark. Code 15-74-705, which requires the lessor's royalty to be paid at the same price including premiums and bonuses that the working interest receives, the two together are Arkansas's answer to the question of whether an operator can structure a sale so that the royalty share is worth less than the working interest share.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-73-207 in full on the verbatim mirror; the section is short enough that the quote above is the whole of it. How Arkansas courts have applied the prudent operator standard to particular disputes was not read and is stated in the gaps.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-72-607, with § 15-72-604

Owning the minerals under a tract in Arkansas does not carry the gas that somebody else put there. Ark. Code 15-72-607 provides that all gas which has been reduced to possession and is subsequently injected into underground storage fields, sands, reservoirs and facilities shall at all times be deemed the property of the injector, their heirs, successors or assigns, and that in no event shall it be subject to the right of the owner of the surface, or of the owner of any mineral interest under which the storage lies, or of anyone other than the injector, to produce, take, reduce to possession, waste or otherwise interfere with it. That is the rule against a landowner capturing stored gas, and it is stated as strongly as any provision on this record. The balance is in the last sentence of the same section and in the section that precedes it. The injector has NO right to gas in any stratum, or portion of one, which has not been condemned under the subchapter or otherwise purchased, so the protection extends only as far as the interest actually acquired. And Ark. Code 15-72-604 limits what can be taken: a natural gas public utility or gas storage facility may condemn a subsurface stratum the Oil and Gas Commission finds suitable and in the public interest, but not a stratum the Commission affirmatively finds on substantial evidence is producing or capable of producing oil in paying quantities through any known recovery method, and a gas-bearing stratum only where its value as a storage reservoir exceeds its value for producing the relatively small volumes of gas remaining in it.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-72-607, with 15-72-604, on the verbatim mirror. Subchapter 6 of chapter 72 was reached by walking the chapter end to end rather than by looking for a storage provision; nothing in the chapter's name would send a reader to it.

Cal. Civ. Code § 883.110

For the chapter that governs terminating a dormant mineral right, a mineral right means an interest in minerals, regardless of character, whether fugacious or nonfugacious, organic or inorganic, that is created by grant or reservation, regardless of form, whether a fee or lesser interest, mineral, royalty or leasehold, absolute or fractional, corporeal or incorporeal, and it includes express or implied appurtenant surface rights.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at Civil Code section 883.110. This is the widest statutory definition of a severed mineral interest on this record and it is worth reading twice, because most of the definitions here are narrow on purpose. New Mexico defines an owner by the right to drill. Montana defines an oil and gas estate as ownership of what lies under a tract. Louisiana refuses the category altogether. California instead sweeps in every axis on which such an interest can vary: what the substance is, how the interest was created, what form it takes, whether it is whole or fractional, and whether it is corporeal or incorporeal. The last clause is the one to carry away, because it decides arguments rather than describing them: the mineral right INCLUDES express or implied appurtenant surface rights. A California mineral owner's right to get at the minerals is inside the definition of the thing they own. Note the scope limit in the section's own opening words: this definition governs that chapter, so it is the definition used when deciding what can be terminated as dormant, and this record does not extend it beyond that.

Cal. Civ. Code § 883.140

If the term of a mineral right lease has expired or the lease has been abandoned by the lessee, the lessee must within thirty days after demand by the lessor execute, acknowledge and deliver, or cause to be recorded, a deed quitclaiming all interest in the mineral rights the lease covered. Where the expiration or abandonment covers less than the lessee's whole interest, the lessee must deliver an appropriate instrument or notice of surrender or termination covering the part that has ended. A lessee who fails to comply is liable for all damages the lessor sustains as a result, including court costs and reasonable attorney's fees in an action to clear title, and forfeits a further one hundred and fifty dollars to the lessor. Lessee includes an assignee or other successor, and lessor includes a successor, heir or grantee. Nothing in the section makes the quitclaim, or a demand for one, a condition precedent to an action to clear the lessor's title.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at Civil Code section 883.140. This addresses a complaint that turns up constantly and that most of this record cannot answer: a lease that everyone agrees is over but that still sits in the records clouding the title, because nobody made the lessee release it. California puts a thirty day clock on it, runs the clock from the lessor's demand rather than from the expiry, binds assignees and successors on both sides, and makes the sanction attorney's fees rather than a token. The last subsection is the one a lawyer will want: the demand is NOT a condition precedent, so a lessor who never made one has not lost the right to sue to clear title. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether a California court has construed what abandonment by the lessee means here, and the fixed sum has not been adjusted in the text as read, so it is stated as the statute states it rather than in present-day terms.

Notch Mountain Corp. v. Elliott, 898 P.2d 550, 556 (Colo. 1995), as quoted in Noble Energy, Inc. v. Lembke, No. 17CA1616 (Colo. App. Sept. 6, 2018)

A conveyance that severs the minerals from the surface creates a separate and distinct estate in Colorado, and while in place minerals are real property.

Checked July 25, 2026. Read inside the Court of Appeals opinion in Noble Energy, Inc. v. Lembke, which quotes Notch Mountain and gives the pin cite 898 P.2d at 556. The Notch Mountain and Corlett opinions themselves were not reachable; the quoted language above is verbatim from the Lembke page that was fetched.

C.R.S. § 10-11-123

Colorado requires a title insurance commitment to state when a mineral estate has been severed, and to warn that the mineral owner may be able to enter and use the surface without the surface owner's permission.

Checked July 25, 2026. Full text of the section read at colorado.public.law, current through Fall 2025. The section also requires the commitment to state "that a mineral estate has been severed, leased, or otherwise conveyed from the surface estate".

C.G.S. § 47-33s, Dormant Mineral Interests Act: Effect of termination of mineral interest

A mineral interest means an interest in a mineral estate, however created and regardless of form, whether absolute or fractional, divided or undivided, corporeal or incorporeal, including a fee simple or any lesser interest or any kind of royalty, production payment, executive right, nonexecutive right, leasehold or security interest in minerals, regardless of character, whether fugacious or nonfugacious, organic or inorganic. A mineral estate means any interest in or ownership of minerals which are or may be situated in, on or under land the fee estate of which is owned by any other person or entity, and includes a fee interest, a leasehold, a life use, any term measured by the life of another or by a future event whether contingent or not, and any easement or licence in, over and across the land for the purpose of obtaining access to and removing the minerals. Minerals includes oil, gas, coal, other liquid, gaseous and solid hydrocarbons, oil shale, cement material, sand and gravel, road material, building stone, chemical substances, gemstones, metallic ores, fissionable and nonfissionable ores, colloidal and other clays, steam and other geothermal resources, and any other substance defined as a mineral by the law of the state. Those definitions govern the dormant act only: the statute says in terms that it does not affect the meaning of minerals, mineral interest or mineral estate for any other purpose. And when an interest is terminated, a court order or decree, once recorded, merges the terminated mineral interest, including its express and implied appurtenant surface rights and obligations, with the surface estate in shares proportionate to the ownership of the surface estate, subject to existing tax liens or assessments.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at C.G.S. §§ 47-33o, 47-33p(c) and 47-33s on 2026-08-03. TWO THINGS HERE ARE WORTH A CONNECTICUT OWNER'S ATTENTION AND NEITHER IS OBVIOUS FROM THE HEADLINE. FIRST, THE BREADTH. This is the widest definition of a severed mineral interest on this record, and it is wide in a direction that matters in a state whose extractive industry is crushed stone and aggregate rather than oil: SAND AND GRAVEL, ROAD MATERIAL and BUILDING STONE are named minerals, so a severed right to take them is a mineral interest that can be terminated after twenty years of non use. New Hampshire, read the same week, comes at the same material from the opposite end, defining EARTH as sand, gravel, rock and soil for the purposes of a permit regime and a per unit tax while expressly excluding dimension stone; Connecticut names building stone IN. SECOND, WHAT MERGER DOES AND DOES NOT DO. The interest goes into the surface estate in shares proportionate to surface ownership, which is Maryland's rule and which matters where the surface has been subdivided since the severance: the terminated interest does not go to one person, it is split across the current surface owners in proportion. And the express and implied APPURTENANT SURFACE RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS merge with it, so the access easement dies with the estate it served. THE LIMIT IS IN THE STATUTE ITSELF and the page states it: § 47-33p(c) says these definitions do not affect the meaning of minerals, mineral interest or mineral estate for purposes other than the dormant act. So nothing here tells a Connecticut reader what MINERALS means in their own deed. WHAT IS NOT READ: any Connecticut decision construing a mineral reservation, and whether a Connecticut severed interest is separately assessed for property tax, which matters because paying such a tax is one of the five saving uses.

7 Del. C. § 6101, Definitions

Delaware's mineral law is one chapter, headed Minerals in Submerged Lands. Its first sentence is wider than its heading: this chapter shall apply to all lands located within the boundaries of this State, except that sections relating to fees, royalties or rights to lease shall be applicable only to lands owned by this State. The definitions then run the other way. Submerged lands means lands lying below the line of mean low tide in the beds of all tidal waters within the boundaries of the State. Tidelands means lands lying between the line of mean high water and the line of mean low water. Filled lands includes tide and submerged lands reclaimed artificially by raising them above the highest probable elevation of the tides by a fill or deposit of earth, rock, sand or other solid imperishable material. And the operative sections describe tide and submerged lands throughout: the Secretary and the Governor have exclusive jurisdiction to lease for mineral exploration and exploitation all ungranted submerged tidelands owned by the State, and the Secretary may permit geological, geophysical and seismic surveys of the tide and submerged lands of the State. The definition of the substance is the widest on this record and it is scientific rather than a list: mineral means any natural inorganic substance with definite chemical and physical properties which is present in, or at the bottom of a body of water, or anywhere within the earth's crust. Gas means all natural gas and all other fluid hydrocarbons not defined as oil, including condensate originally in the gaseous phase in the reservoir; oil means crude petroleum and all other hydrocarbons produced in liquid form by ordinary production methods, excluding liquid hydrocarbons originally in a gaseous phase.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at 7 Del. C. §§ 6101 and 6102 on 2026-08-03, the chapter fetched whole at 70,492 bytes. THE NEGATIVE BEHIND THIS RULE IS THE POINT AND IT WAS COUNTED, NOT ASSUMED. All thirty-one titles of the Delaware Code were fetched one by one and parsed into 1,310 chapter names. MINERAL returns exactly 1 and it is this chapter. MINING returns 0, QUARRY 0, SAND 0, GRAVEL 0, STONE 0 and EARTH 0, against controls of TAX 44 and LAND 27. So the whole of Delaware's mineral legislation, by name, is a chapter about what is under the water. THE TENSION IN THE FIRST SENTENCE IS RECORDED AND NOT RESOLVED, and that is deliberate. Section 6101 says the chapter applies to all lands in the State and carves out only fees, royalties and rights to lease. If that is read literally, then the survey permit, the confidentiality provisions and the enforcement provisions reach a Delaware farm as much as a river bottom. But § 6103 gives the Secretary power to permit surveys of the tide and submerged lands of this State, and every other operative section is drafted the same way, so on the face of those sections there is nothing for the general words to operate on. This record read both and reports both. Deciding which governs is a question of Delaware decisions and none was fetched. WHAT THE DEFINITION OF MINERAL DOES THAT NO OTHER ON THIS RECORD DOES: it defines by physical science rather than by enumeration. Connecticut and Maryland list substances, reaching cement material, sand and gravel, road material and building stone by name. New Hampshire defines earth by what normally masks the bedrock. Delaware says any natural inorganic substance with definite chemical and physical properties anywhere within the earth's crust, which on its face reaches everything inorganic and excludes coal, oil and gas as organic, except that the chapter then defines oil and gas separately and leases them. WHAT IS NOT READ: §§ 6107 to 6111 and 6114 to 6139, so the notice and bidding machinery, the lease terms, bonds and assignment provisions were seen only in outline; 7 Del. C. ch. 72, Subaqueous Lands, which is the neighbouring chapter; and whether any lease has ever been issued under this chapter.

Fla. Stat. s. 270.11, Contracts for sale of public lands to reserve certain mineral rights

Florida severed the minerals under much of its own land by legislation rather than by anybody's deed, and it did it in fractions. In all contracts and deeds for the sale of land executed by the Board of Trustees of the Internal Improvement Trust Fund, or by a local government, a water management district or another agency of the state, there must be reserved an undivided three fourths interest in all the phosphate, minerals and metals, and an undivided one half interest in all the petroleum, with the privilege to mine and develop, unless the agency chooses not to reserve. The reserving body may sell or release the reserved interest in a particular parcel, but only on the owner's own application or petition with a statement of reasons justifying it.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Fla. Stat. s. 270.11(1), (2) and (4) on 2026-08-01. This is a variety of statutory severance that keeps a FRACTION, and it is the only one on this record that does: Alaska, Washington and Hawaii all reserve the whole of the minerals in their state land conveyances. Florida keeps three quarters of one class of substance and one half of another, so a Florida owner whose land came out of a state disposal may hold a quarter of the phosphate and a half of the petroleum rather than none of either. Reading the section against s. 712.03(9) raises a question this record cannot answer: the marketable title act protects interests held by the Board of Trustees, a water management district or the United States, and s. 270.11 also names local governments and other state agencies, which s. 712.03(9) does not. Royalties received by a state agency other than a water management district go to the General Revenue Fund.

O.C.G.A. § 12-4-42(11) and (8)

Georgia's oil and gas statute does not define who owns minerals by reference to a deed. O.C.G.A. 12-4-42 defines OWNER as the person who has the right to drill into and produce from any pool and to appropriate the production, either for himself or herself and another, or himself or herself and others. That is a functional test, identical in shape to the one New Mexico uses, and its practical effect is the same: for everything the regulator does, the person who counts is whoever holds the drilling right at that moment, whether that is a fee mineral owner or a lessee. The definition of MINERAL in the same section is unusually wide. It means any naturally occurring substance found in the earth which has commercial value, expressly including oil and gas as separately defined, and expressly excluding fresh water. Commercial value is the test, so the category moves with the market rather than with a list, and Georgia's kaolin, granite, marble and aggregate all fall inside it even though the severance tax at 12-4-54 reaches only oil and gas.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from the definitions section of the Oil and Gas and Deep Drilling Act, O.C.G.A. 12-4-42, on the verbatim mirror. Ten occurrences of MINERAL inside this one section. The definition of mineral quoted in the summary reads in full: any naturally occurring substance found in the earth which has commercial value, including oil and gas as defined in the same Code section, but not fresh water.

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.

Idaho Code s. 47-701, Reservation of mineral deposits to state

Mineral deposits in lands belonging to the state are reserved to the state and reserved from sale, except upon a rental and royalty basis, and except when the surface estate is identified by the state board of land commissioners as having the potential highest and best use for development purposes such as residential, commercial or industrial purposes. Outside those exceptions the purchaser of state land acquires no right, title or interest in the deposits, and their right is subject to the reservation and to the state and persons authorised by it prospecting for, mining and removing the deposits, and occupying and using so much of the surface as may be required for all purposes reasonably incident to that. The terms mineral lands, mineral, mineral deposits, deposit and mineral right are defined for the chapter to mean all coal, oil, oil shale, gas, phosphate, sodium, asbestos, gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, antimony, geothermal resources, salable minerals and all other minerals or deposits of whatsoever kind or character. An exchange of state land under section 58-138 is not a sale, and mineral transfers previously made in exchanges are ratified.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Idaho Code 47-701 on 2026-08-03. The structure is what to notice. Alaska, Washington and Hawaii each write a mineral reservation into every conveyance of state land by statute, with no exception for what the land is good for. Idaho's reservation has a LAND USE ESCAPE inside it: where the land board finds the surface's potential highest and best use is residential, commercial or industrial, the deposits are not reserved from sale at all, and the land can go as a single estate under 47-711(1). That is the same instinct Oregon's low-potential resource real property rule runs on, and Idaho got there by a different route, through the land board's judgment about the parcel rather than through a zoning and acreage line drawn in the statute. Note the reservation is of deposits in lands BELONGING TO THE STATE; nothing read here writes a reservation into a conveyance by anybody else, so an ordinary private severance in Idaho is a matter of the deed. WHAT IS NOT READ: section 47-708, which sets out the rights and liabilities of lessees toward the surface and which 47-711(2) incorporates, and how a land board development finding is actually made or published.

Idaho Code s. 47-711, Sale of state lands containing mineral deposits

Where the surface estate of state land has previously been sold with a reservation of the mineral estate, there is no lease of that mineral estate to anybody other than the surface owner, and the potential highest and best use of the land is for development purposes such as residential, commercial or industrial, the mineral estate may be sold for its appraised value under the state land sale provisions of chapter 3, title 58. A purchaser of the mineral estate who is not the owner of the surface takes the same rights and liabilities toward the surface estate that section 47-708 gives a state mineral lessee. Separately, where state land is identified as having that development potential in the first place, the land may be sold as a single estate rather than split, and in the sale of the surface of all other state land the minerals are reserved.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Idaho Code 47-711 on 2026-08-03. Set this beside Oregon's ORS 273.787, read the day before, because they answer the same question and disagree on both halves of it. Oregon says the Department of State Lands SHALL release and transfer the reserved rights within sixty days of a completed application, MAY NOT require an appraisal, may not make the owner pay for one it requests, and may not charge more than a hundred and fifty dollars. Idaho says the mineral estate MAY BE SOLD for its APPRAISED VALUE. Duty against discretion, and free against priced. Oregon draws its eligibility line by zoning and lot size; Idaho draws it by the land board's view of highest and best use, which is a judgment rather than a measurement, and the third condition, that no third party holds a lease, is a real gate: a leased reserved estate is not available at any price. Florida and Hawaii also allow a state reservation to be released and both are discretionary. WHAT IS NOT READ: chapter 3 of title 58 and how a sale is actually initiated, whether the surface owner has any preference over other bidders, and how the appraisal is conducted.

Idaho Code s. 47-1602, Geothermal resources defined

Geothermal resources means the natural heat energy of the earth, the energy in whatever form which may be found in any position and at any depth below the surface present in, resulting from, created by, or which may be extracted from that natural heat, and all minerals in solution or other products obtained from the material medium of any geothermal resource. The legislature then answers the classification question by refusing both of the usual boxes: geothermal resources are found and declared to be sui generis, being neither a mineral resource nor a water resource, while also being declared closely related to and possibly affecting and affected by water resources in many instances. And the consequence is written in one sentence that runs in both directions at once: no right to seek, obtain or use geothermal resources has passed or shall pass with any existing or future lease of state or school lands, including but not limited to mineral leases and leases issued under chapter 8 of title 47.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Idaho Code 47-1602 on 2026-08-03, added 1972 ch. 182. Three states on this record now answer who owns geothermal and no two agree. Hawaii's HRS 182-1 makes all geothermal resources a mineral by definition, and 182-2 reserves the minerals under state lands and reserved lands to the State. Oregon's ORS 522.035 puts ownership in the owner of the surface property unless the rights were otherwise reserved or conveyed. Idaho declares it neither. Be exact about what Idaho's declaration decides and what it does not. It is about classification, not about ownership, and 47-701(1) still names geothermal resources in the list of deposits reserved to the state in state lands, so on state land the state has it either way. What 47-1602 settles is that a LEASE of the minerals does not reach it, retrospectively and prospectively in the same clause. WHAT IS NOT READ: who owns geothermal under private Idaho land, and whether a private mineral reservation or conveyance carries it. Nothing read answers that, and the sui generis declaration is a reason to think a court would not simply assume either way.

765 ILCS 515/1

For the purposes of the Severed Mineral Interest Act a severed mineral interest is any whole or fractional interest in any or all minerals which have been severed from the surface estate by grant, exception, reservation or other means. An unknown or missing owner is any person or entity vested with such an interest whose present identity or location cannot be determined from the records of the county where the interest is located and by diligent inquiry in the vicinity of the owner's last known place of residence, and it includes their unknown heirs, successors and assigns. A surface owner is any person or entity vested with a whole or undivided fee simple interest or other freehold interest in the surface estate overlying a severed mineral interest, and expressly does not include the owner of a right of way, easement, leasehold or any other lesser estate.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 1 of the Severed Mineral Interest Act. The definition is worth having because of what it does not do: it does not list the substances, so the Act reaches any or all minerals rather than oil and gas alone, which is the opposite of Michigan's act. It also settles who can use the two mechanisms above by excluding lesser estates from the definition of a surface owner, so a tenant or an easement holder cannot bring either proceeding. And the definition of an unknown or missing owner sets the standard of search: the county records plus diligent inquiry in the vicinity of the last known residence, which is a narrower duty than North Dakota's four statutory searches. WHAT IS NOT READ: what a grant or reservation of minerals reaches in an Illinois deed, which is a question of construction and is in this state's gaps.

Ind. Code § 32-23-10-1

For the Indiana dormant mineral chapter, a mineral interest means the interest created by an instrument that transfers an interest of any kind in coal, oil and gas, and other minerals, whether by grant, by assignment, by reservation or otherwise. The definition turns on the instrument having created the interest rather than on the form the transaction took.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at IC 32-23-10-1. The breadth is the point and it runs in two directions. The substances are coal, oil and gas, and other minerals, so unlike Michigan's act, which reaches oil and gas only, and unlike Ohio's, which excepts coal, Indiana's chapter covers the lot. And the routes are grant, assignment, reservation "or otherwise", so a reservation in a deed of the surface is caught as squarely as an outright conveyance of the minerals. The definition governs this chapter and is not a general statement of Indiana property law. What a severed Indiana mineral estate is outside this chapter has NOT been read.

Iowa Code s. 458A.18, Mineral rights taxed separately

Iowa treats the severed mineral estate as a piece of real estate with its own tax bill. All rights and interests in or to oil, gas or other minerals underlying land, however they were created, whether by deed, lease, reservation of rights or otherwise, which are owned by anyone other than the owner of the land, must be assessed and taxed separately to the owner of those rights in the same manner as other real estate. To make that worth administering the statute sets a floor rather than a rate: in order to pay the costs of assessment and collection and provide a reasonable minimum standard of taxation, the taxes on mineral rights not owned by the landowner shall be not less than five cents per acre. One protection runs the other way, for the person on top: the taxes on those rights are not a lien on the land.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Iowa Code ss. 458A.18 and 458A.19 on 2026-08-01. This section is doing more work on this state than a tax provision usually does, because the dormancy exemption at s. 557C.6 keys off it: the thing that takes a coal interest outside the lapse statute is having been separately taxed, and this is the section that makes separate taxation the norm for every severed mineral interest in Iowa. Read the two together and Iowa's scheme is a tax roll with a filing requirement attached for the interests that fell off it. Set the five cents an acre beside Minnesota, which charges forty cents an acre with a three dollar twenty minimum, and Alabama, which removes the interest from the roll permanently in exchange for a few cents paid once. The clause about the tax not being a lien on the land is the reason a surface owner is not exposed to a mineral owner's arrears.

K.S.A. § 55-223

As a matter of Kansas public policy, all oil and gas leases and subleases for the exploration, development and production of oil, gas or other minerals which are held by production are presumed to contain, in addition to any express covenants, an implied covenant to reasonably explore and to develop the minerals which are the subject of the lease, and that covenant is a burden on the lessee and any successor in interest. In an action for breach of an implied or express covenant of reasonable exploration or development of land covered by a lease held by production, a presumption of breach arises if the party seeking relief produces competent evidence that at the time the action is commenced there is no mineral production from the subsurface part or parts of the land in question, and that initial production on the lease commenced at least fifteen years before the action. If the court finds the lessee has failed to comply it may allow a reasonable time to comply, or it may issue an order terminating the lessee's right to those subsurface parts, and may enter such other orders as the interests of the parties and equity require.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 55-223, 55-224 and 55-226. This has no counterpart anywhere on this record and it addresses a complaint a great many mineral owners have without knowing there is a name for it: a lease held alive by a shallow well while the deep rights sit undeveloped for decades. Kansas legislated the implied covenant rather than leaving it to case law, put the burden on the lessee, and then shifted the burden of proof by statute: fifteen years since first production plus no production from the subsurface part in question, and the lessee is presumed to have breached. The remedy is the one that matters, which is that the court may terminate the lessee's right to those subsurface parts rather than merely award damages. Two limits are in the text. It applies to leases HELD BY PRODUCTION, so a lease inside its primary term is outside it. And the presumption is about a subsurface part or parts, so the analysis is horizon by horizon rather than lease-wide. WHAT IS NOT READ: sections 55-225, 55-227, 55-228 and 55-229, which govern how the presumption is overcome, when an action is not permissible, the prohibition on waiver, and the saving of other rights. Those decide most real cases and are named in the gaps.

K.S.A. § 55-1601

For the purposes of the lapse and reversion act, a mineral interest means an interest created by an instrument transferring, by grant, assignment, reservation or otherwise, an interest of any kind in coal, oil, gas or other minerals.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 55-1601. Short, and it does two things worth separating. It fixes the reach of the lapse act by substance, and it reaches coal and other minerals rather than oil and gas alone, which is the opposite of Michigan and the same breadth as Ohio's act outside its coal exception. And it fixes the reach by mode of creation, catching a reservation as readily as a grant, so the common pattern of a seller reserving the minerals is squarely inside. The revisor prints a case annotation under this section citing Scully v. Overall, 17 Kan. App. 2d 582, 840 P.2d 1211 (1992), for the proposition that a mineral interest lapses and reverts if unused for twenty years with no claim filed under section 55-1604. THAT OPINION HAS NOT BEEN FETCHED and nothing here rests on it; it is recorded because the revisor prints it and because it is the obvious next read. WHAT IS NOT READ: what a grant or reservation of minerals reaches in a Kansas deed, which is a question of construction this act does not touch.

Ky. Const. § 19(2)

Where a Kentucky instrument purporting to sever the surface and mineral estates, to grant a mineral estate, or to grant a right to extract minerals fails to state in express and specific terms the method of coal extraction, or subordinates the surface estate to the mineral estate, it is held, absent clear and convincing evidence to the contrary, that the parties intended coal to be extracted only by the methods of commercial coal extraction commonly known to be in use in that area of Kentucky when the instrument was executed. The mineral estate is dominant only for extraction by those methods.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read as the per-section PDF the Kentucky General Assembly publishes for section 19 of the constitution, extracted with pdftotext -layout. The section carries its own provenance: text as ratified on November 8, 1988, the amendment proposed by 1988 Ky. Acts ch. 117, sec. 1, on an original version ratified August 3, 1891 and revised September 28, 1891. Two things make this worth more to this record than an ordinary state rule. First, it answers the question every other state page on this site expressly declines to answer, which is what a grant or reservation of minerals actually conveys, and it answers it as a rule of construction rather than as case law. Second, it is retrospective in terms: it applies to an instrument "heretofore or hereafter executed", which is the point of it, because the instruments in question are a century old. Note the limits precisely. It is a presumption and not a prohibition, rebuttable by clear and convincing evidence. It is expressed in terms of COAL extraction throughout and this record has read nothing on how it applies, if at all, to oil and gas. And whether the provision has survived challenge, or how Kentucky courts have applied it, has NOT been read and nothing here should be taken to say.

La. Rev. Stat. § 31:6

Ownership of land in Louisiana does not include ownership of oil, gas and other minerals occurring naturally in liquid or gaseous form, or of any elements or compounds in solution, emulsion or association with them. What the landowner has is the exclusive right to explore and develop the property for the production of such minerals and to reduce them to possession and ownership. Solid minerals are treated differently and are owned as part of the land.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at article 6 of the Louisiana Mineral Code. This is the sentence that puts Louisiana outside the system every other state on this record belongs to, and everything else on this page follows from it. Texas recognises the ownership of oil and gas in place as a property right and treats an oil and gas lease as conveying a determinable fee in the minerals. Colorado treats a severing conveyance as creating a separate and distinct estate. Louisiana has neither, because there is nothing in place to own: until the oil or gas is reduced to possession it belongs to nobody, and what can be owned and conveyed is a RIGHT to go and get it. That is why a Louisiana instrument does not sever a mineral estate, and why nothing on this page uses the phrase. WHAT IS NOT READ: article 5 on the ownership of solid minerals, and how the distinction is applied to substances that are arguably neither.

La. Rev. Stat. § 31:16

The basic mineral rights a Louisiana landowner may create are the mineral servitude, the mineral royalty and the mineral lease, and that enumeration does not exclude the creation of others. Mineral rights are real rights, and they are subject either to the prescription of nonuse for ten years or to special rules of law governing the term of their existence. A mineral servitude is the right of enjoyment of land belonging to another for the purpose of exploring for and producing minerals and reducing them to possession and ownership.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at articles 16 and 21 of the Mineral Code. The quoted sentence is the whole difference between Louisiana and every other state here, stated in one line by the legislature. Everywhere else on this record a severed mineral interest is perpetual by default, and the question the dormancy page asks is whether some statute can take it away. In Louisiana the default runs the other way: the right is temporary by its nature, and the question is whether the owner has done enough to keep it alive. Note the vocabulary, because using the wrong word here produces a wrong answer: a mineral servitude burdens the land of another and carries the right to explore and produce; a mineral royalty is a right to share in production without the right to conduct operations; a mineral lease is a contract right. All three prescribe. WHAT IS NOT READ: the special rules governing the term of a mineral lease, which is the third of the three and the one most readers will actually hold.

38 M.R.S. s. 490-MM, Definitions

Maine defines the whole subject by reference to metal. A metallic mineral means any mineral, ore or excavated material that has metal or a metalloid element as its economically valuable constituent, regardless of the chemical end product of that element. So the test is economic rather than chemical or geological: what matters is which constituent is the reason the material is worth taking, and what the metal is eventually turned into does not matter. Mining, mining operation and mining activity mean the activities, facilities or processes necessary for extracting or removing metallic minerals or overburden, or for preparing, washing, cleaning or otherwise treating them, and expressly include bulk sampling, advanced exploration, extraction and beneficiation as well as waste storage, other stockpiles and reclamation activities. But mining does not include exploration, which is dealt with separately and, below the department's threshold, without a permit at all.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at 38 M.R.S. s. 490-MM(8) and (11) on 2026-08-03, s. 490-MM(8) as amended by PL 2023 c. 398. This definition is load-bearing well beyond the Mining Act, because 36 M.R.S. s. 2855 pulls it across to decide what the five per cent excise tax reaches, so the same words settle both what needs a mining permit and what pays the tax. The economic test is the part to hold onto and it cuts both ways: a rock quarried for its stone is outside, and the same rock quarried because of a metal in it is inside. Compare how other states on this record draw the line. Hawaii lists substances and then expressly excludes the sand, rock and gravel used in general construction, which is most of what Hawaii digs. Idaho's state lands reservation lists coal, oil, oil shale, gas, phosphate, sodium, asbestos, gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, antimony, geothermal resources and salable minerals and then adds all other minerals of whatsoever kind. Maryland's dormant mineral act lists eight categories including cement materials, sand and gravel, road materials and building stone. Maine is the narrowest of the four and it gets there with a functional test rather than a list. THE EXCLUSION OF EXPLORATION matters for a landowner rather than for a taxpayer: the department's own page states that exploration limited to excavations with a maximum surface opening of no more than three hundred square feet requires no permit at all, only a work plan and performance standards. WHAT IS NOT READ: the rest of the Maine Metallic Mineral Mining Act at 38 M.R.S. ss. 490-LL to 490-TT, including whatever it says about landowner consent, notice or damages.

Md. Code, Tax-Property s. 8-229, Separate assessment of minerals

If minerals and mineral rights are owned separately from the land in which they are located, the supervisor may assess the minerals and mineral rights separately from the land. That is the whole section, and it is permissive rather than mandatory: the supervisor MAY assess, so whether a particular Maryland severed interest carries its own tax bill is an administrative decision rather than a statutory consequence of severance. The section matters beyond the tax it authorises, because Maryland's dormant mineral act makes payment of a tax on a separate assessment one of the four things that constitute use of a mineral interest, and therefore one of the ways an owner defeats a termination action. An owner whose interest has never been separately assessed cannot pay that tax and so cannot rely on that saving event, which makes the supervisor's discretion a decision about the durability of somebody's title as well as about revenue.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Md. Code, Tax-Property s. 8-229 on 2026-08-03, in full, and it is one sentence. Two things follow that a reader should have together. First, this is the section Maryland's dormant mineral act at Environment s. 15-1203(c)(2) points to for THREE different taxes: a tax on a separate assessment, a transfer tax relating to a mineral, and a severance tax relating to a mineral, each said to be in accordance with s. 8-229. Only the first of the three is in s. 8-229. There is no transfer tax in it and no severance tax in it. So two of the three tax saving events in Maryland's dormant mineral act cite a statute that does not contain them, and this record does not know whether those taxes exist elsewhere in Maryland law or whether the cross reference is simply wrong. Second, only Colorado, Alabama and Minnesota have been read on this record for the property tax treatment of a severed mineral interest as distinct from production, and Maryland is a fourth answer: not an automatic separate assessment as in Minnesota, not a permanent exemption bought once at the courthouse as in Alabama, but a discretion. WHAT IS NOT READ: the Tax General Article, the rest of the Tax Property Article, whether any Maryland county exercises the discretion, and what happens to a separately assessed mineral interest that falls into tax arrears.

Md. Code, Environment s. 14-111, Duties of permit holder

Every holder of a permit to drill for gas or oil must submit a completion report within thirty days of finishing the well, submit cutting samples on request, notify the Department before a well is abandoned, and comply with the sealing, plugging and reclamation requirements. On money, three separate obligations run together. Financial assurance of at least fifty thousand dollars for each gas or oil well, including each well on a multiwell pad, and never less than the most recent closure cost estimate the permit holder gave with the application. Comprehensive general liability insurance of at least three hundred thousand dollars for each person and five hundred thousand dollars for each occurrence, to pay damages for injury to persons or property caused by sudden accidental occurrences arising from the permitted activities, including the costs of investigating, defending or settling claims. And environmental pollution liability insurance of at least one million dollars per loss for bodily injury, property damage and NATURAL RESOURCE DAMAGE, including cleanup and remediation, for sudden or non sudden releases of pollutants, which must be maintained for five years after the Department determines the well has been properly sealed and plugged and the site reclaimed. The financial assurance must extend to the owner or owners of the surface AND SUBSURFACE property, and must cover the acts and omissions of the permit holder's contractors and subcontractors.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Md. Code, Environment s. 14-111 on 2026-08-03. The quoted subsection is the reason this belongs on a page for mineral owners rather than only for neighbours: the financial assurance runs to the SUBSURFACE owner as well as the surface owner, so a Maryland mineral owner whose lessee walks away from a hole has a claim on the security rather than only a claim against a company. Idaho's surface use bond, read the same day, is six thousand dollars per well site and runs to the surface landowner only. Maryland's is fifty thousand dollars per well and runs to both estates, and the pollution insurance survives five years past plugging. Note the exemption at subsection (d): a well in existence on or before 1 October 2013 keeps the bond and insurance required by its most recent permit, unless it is later recompleted, stimulated, deepened or given lateral extensions, at which point the modern figures apply. The word STIMULATED in that list is doing nothing since 2017, because stimulating a Maryland oil or gas well by hydraulic fracturing is now prohibited outright. WHAT IS NOT READ: the Department's regulations, and how a subsurface owner actually claims against the assurance.

MGL c. 21B § 2, Definitions

Chapter 21B defines mining as every operation, underground and above ground, for the purpose of extracting or removing COAL, or preparing coal or coal products for use outside the mined area. Exploration means any test boring, drilling operation or surface examination designed to determine the amount and extent of COAL deposits. A mining operation is any shaft, slope, drift or open excavation designed to extract COAL. The fund the chapter creates for fees, forfeited bonds and penalties is the Anthracite Coal Mining Reclamation Fund. Nothing in the chapter reaches any other substance. Two requirements are worth a mineral owner's attention. Anybody wanting to explore for coal must file an application specifying the exact tract, THE RIGHT BY WHICH THE APPLICANT CAN ENTER UPON IT, the exact exploration to be conducted and the provisions made to restore the surface; and a hundred and eighty days after the exploration concludes the licensee must MAKE THE RESULTS PUBLIC. And a coal mining licence application must give the names and addresses of all legal owners of record of the land and of the abutting lands, and separately THE NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF ALL OWNERS OF THE COAL TO BE MINED, which is the only provision read here that contemplates the coal belonging to somebody other than the landowner.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at MGL c. 21B §§ 2, 4, 5, 10 and 13 on 2026-08-03. THE PROBE FOR THIS STATE SAID ALMOST NO EXTRACTION BEYOND AGGREGATE, AND THAT IS WHY THE CHAPTER WAS OPENED RATHER THAN CHARACTERISED FROM ITS NAME. What is in it is a full late twentieth century coal regime in a state with no coal industry: an environmental impact report addressing coal dust, mine gases, toxic vapours, mine fires and water contamination; maps at not more than a hundred feet to the inch showing every aquifer, building, pipeline and communication line within five hundred feet of the farthest extension of the mine, the thickness and distribution of the coal deposit and THE REMAINDER OF THE DEPOSIT NOT TO BE EXTRACTED; public liability insurance covering cave-ins, sink holes, escaping mine gases and every form of water pollution, carried for FIVE YEARS AFTER the commissioner certifies the legal closing of the mine; a surety bond on the same five year tail; newspaper advertising once a week for four successive weeks; and sixty days notice of a public hearing before any licence issues. Section 10 lets the commissioner enter land without the owner's permission to control a mine fire, a refuse bank fire or subsidence, charging the cost against the land to offset any damages claim. Section 13 provides that nothing in the chapter supersedes local zoning. THE DISCLOSURE DUTY IN § 4 IS THE ONE WITH NO COUNTERPART ON THIS RECORD, AND DELAWARE, READ THE SAME DAY, IS ITS EXACT INVERSE. Exploration data is ordinarily the explorer's own; Idaho, South Carolina and Missouri each regulate mining without compelling anybody to publish what they found. Massachusetts gives a coal explorer a hundred and eighty days and then makes the results public. Delaware's 7 Del. C. §§ 6104(c), 6105 and 6106 make the same class of information confidential unless the permittee releases it, close it to any other person or agency without written consent, and make it a CRIMINAL OFFENCE for the Secretary or their staff to disclose it. Same subject, opposite defaults, in two states that neither of them has the industry the provision imagines. WHAT IS NOT READ: §§ 1, 3, 6 to 9, 11, 12, 14 and 15 of the chapter, so the term of a licence, the inspection regime, the water quality rules, the closure survey and the penalties were seen only in outline. And nothing read establishes that any licence has ever been issued.

MCL 554.291(1)

Michigan's termination act applies to an interest in oil or gas in land owned by a person other than the owner of the surface. It is framed by the substance, oil or gas rather than minerals generally, and by the split, so an interest held by the surface owner is outside it.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at the opening of the abandonment section, and recorded because the scope is the sharpest contrast with the other lapse states on this record. Ohio's equivalent act defines mineral broadly enough to reach sand, gravel, clay, shale, limestone and ore as well as oil and gas, and exempts coal. North Dakota's reaches any interest in oil, gas, coal, clay, gravel, uranium and all other minerals of any kind. Michigan's is titled Termination of Oil or Gas Interests in Land and its operative words are oil or gas throughout, so on the reading done here it does not reach a severed interest in other minerals. What was not read is whether some separate Michigan statute does, and that gap is named on this page rather than resolved by inference.

Minn. Stat. § 273.165

Minnesota imposes an annual tax of 40 cents per acre or portion of an acre on a severed mineral interest, meaning an interest in any minerals, including gas, coal and oil, owned separately and apart from the fee title to the surface. A fractional undivided interest pays the fraction of 40 cents, computed to the nearest cent, and the minimum annual tax on any mineral interest is $3.20. The tax reaches interests recorded with either the county recorder or the registrar of titles whether or not they were filed under the severed mineral interest registration sections. It does not reach interests valued and taxed under other mineral tax laws, or interests exempt by constitutional or related statutory provisions.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Minn. Stat. § 273.165 subd. 1 in the 2025 Minnesota Statutes. This is a holding cost on the interest itself and it is owed whether or not a shovel ever goes in the ground, which is not how most of this record's states treat an idle interest. Only Colorado and Alabama have been read on the property tax treatment of the interest as distinct from production, and Minnesota is the only one of the three with a stated per-acre rate and a stated floor. Three details a reader would want. The section applies to recorded interests expressly "whether or not filed pursuant to sections 93.52 to 93.551", so an owner who missed the registration statement is still liable for the tax while the interest is exposed to forfeiture. The minimum means a very small fractional interest still costs $3.20 a year, so the arithmetic runs against exactly the fragmented ownership the registration scheme says it exists to clear up. And the tax sits outside any levy limit and does not reduce other taxes in the area; 20 percent of the revenue is distributed under § 116J.64. Subd. 2, on unmined iron ore assessed as part of the real estate, was read and is not summarised here. WHAT IS NOT READ: how the tax is assessed and collected in practice, and whether it has been challenged.

Miss. Code Ann. § 89-1-1, with §§ 89-1-39 and 89-1-41

Mississippi has no statute telling a court how to read a mineral severance deed. Chapter 1 of Title 89 is where such a rule would sit, it was walked end to end, sixty-two sections, and the word mineral does not appear in it. So the general conveyancing provisions govern, and three of them decide most of what a mineral owner needs. Miss. Code 89-1-1 provides that any interest in or claim to land may be conveyed to vest immediately or in the future by writing signed and delivered, and that such a writing transfers, ACCORDING TO ITS TERMS, the title of the person signing it, WITH ALL ITS INCIDENTS, as fully and perfectly as if it were transferred by feoffment with livery of seizin, and it says this holds notwithstanding there may be an adverse possession of the land. Two consequences follow for minerals. A severance needs no particular form of words beyond a signed and delivered writing, and what passes is measured by the terms of the instrument together with the incidents of the estate, which is the common law rule rather than the modern statutory reversal Tennessee adopted in 2011. Miss. Code 89-1-39 then deals with the commonest defect in a mineral chain: a conveyance of quitclaim and release is sufficient to pass ALL the estate or interest the grantor has, and estops the grantor and their heirs from asserting a subsequently acquired adverse title to the land conveyed. So a quitclaim of the minerals given by an heir before an estate was settled binds them once the title arrives. And Miss. Code 89-1-41 supplies the warranty most Mississippi deeds actually contain: the words grant, bargain, sell operate as an express covenant that the grantor was seized of an estate free from encumbrances made or suffered by the grantor, and for quiet enjoyment against the grantor and their heirs and assigns, unless limited by express words in the conveyance. Note the limit in that covenant: it reaches encumbrances the GRANTOR made or suffered, not those of anyone earlier in the chain.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Miss. Code 89-1-1, 89-1-39 and 89-1-41 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 1 of Title 89 walked end to end through the Previous and Next chain, sixty-two sections, the walk confirmed to have reached the chapter boundary. The negative that Mississippi has no mineral-specific deed construction statute rests on that read: the word mineral appears zero times in the entire chapter.

Miss. Code Ann. § 53-11-9(1)

Mississippi passed the Geologic Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide Act as chapter 11 of Title 53, and it is worth a mineral owner's attention because it is the one place in Mississippi law where somebody else can be given the use of the rock under your land by order. Miss. Code 53-11-9(1) empowers the State Oil and Gas Board, after notice and hearing under 53-1-19 to 53-1-37, to approve a proposed geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide on five findings. The reservoir must be suitable and feasible for injection, storage and withdrawal and its use in the public interest. A MAJORITY INTEREST must have consented in writing; or, for a preliminary technical order which must later satisfy 53-11-11(3), the storage operator must show it made a good faith effort to obtain that majority consent and that ALL NONCONSENTING OWNERS ARE OR WILL BE EQUITABLY COMPENSATED. There must be no reasonable risk that the storage will injure or endanger other formations containing fresh water, oil, gas or other commercial mineral deposits. There must be no reasonable risk to human life or of a hazardous condition to property. And where the reservoir may itself contain oil, gas or other commercial minerals, the Board must find that it has been substantially depleted of them, or make the alternative finding the subsection provides. So the protections for a mineral owner are real but they are conditions on an order rather than a veto: a majority can carry the reservoir, and what an individual owner is left with is the requirement of equitable compensation and the findings about not endangering the minerals. Note also what this chapter does NOT settle, and what the legislature has repeatedly declined to settle: whether the pore space belongs to the surface owner or to the mineral owner in the first place.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Miss. Code 53-11-9 on the verbatim mirror, chapter walked end to end, eighteen sections. It is filed under severance rather than under surface use because what it decides is who may use a stratum, which is a question about the estate rather than about surface operations. The currency control found three separate bills, SB2008 and SB2880 of 2025 and SB2028 of 2026, which would have required a recorded instrument to convey carbon credits or sequestration rights and would therefore have gone some way to answering the ownership question; all three died in committee, and that is stated in the gaps on this page.

RSMo s. 444.050, Ownership of ore

All lead ore or other mineral dug or mined in or upon the lands of any person in Missouri is deemed and held to be the absolute property of the owner or lessee of those lands, except where it is modified, changed or transferred by express contract. The section is one sentence and it does two things at once. It states the default ownership rule for anything actually severed from the ground, which is that it belongs to the person who owns the land it came out of rather than to whoever did the digging. And it makes the exception turn on an EXPRESS contract, so a mining arrangement that leaves ownership of the produced ore unstated leaves it with the landowner. Read alongside the two posting sections on this page, it is the rule that makes them work: a miner operating under posted terms, or under the three year right that arises when no terms were posted, is producing ore that belongs to the landowner from the moment it is dug, and what the miner has is a right to work and a duty to pay royalty rather than title to what comes up.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at RSMo s. 444.050 on 2026-08-03. RSMo 1939 s. 14787, amended by Laws 1955 p. 655, with prior revisions running back to 1909. The words to hold onto are ABSOLUTE PROPERTY and EXPRESS CONTRACT. Most states leave the ownership of severed product to the terms of the lease and to the common law of the mineral estate; Missouri states a default and requires an express agreement to displace it. Note who the default runs to: the owner OR LESSEE of the lands, so a mining lessee who has taken the mineral estate holds the produced ore against a third party digger in the same way the fee owner would. WHAT IS NOT READ, and it matters for how far this reaches: nothing was read on how a mineral estate is severed from the surface in Missouri in the first place, because chapter 442 does not mention minerals at all and no Missouri decision was fetched. So this section tells you who owns ore once it is out of the ground and does not tell you who owned it while it was still in.

RSMo s. 259.220, Taxation of mineral rights

All rights and interests in or to oil, gas or other minerals underlying land, whether created by or arising under deed, lease, reservation of rights, or otherwise, which are owned by any person other than the owner of the land, shall be assessed and taxed separately to the owner of those rights or interests in the same manner as other real estate. The word is shall rather than may, so separate assessment is the statutory consequence of severance rather than an administrative choice. The list of ways an interest can arise is deliberately wide and closes with the words or otherwise, so a reservation in an old deed, a lease, and anything else that puts the minerals in different hands from the surface all fall inside it. And then the second sentence, which is the protection for the person on top: the taxes on such rights or interests which are not owned by the owner of the land shall not be a lien on the land.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at RSMo s. 259.220 on 2026-08-03. Five states on this record have now been read on the property tax treatment of a severed mineral interest as distinct from production, and no two answer alike. Minnesota assesses automatically at a stated rate per acre with a floor, and forfeiture to the state is the ultimate sanction. Alabama takes the interest off the roll permanently in exchange for a few cents an acre paid once at the courthouse when the deed is recorded, and says a tax sale of the surface cannot in any manner whatsoever affect it. Maryland's supervisor MAY assess separately, at discretion. Colorado has its own treatment. Missouri says SHALL, for every severed interest however created, at ordinary real estate treatment, and then insulates the surface expressly. The non lien clause is the distinctive half and it cuts both ways: the surface owner's land cannot be taken for the mineral owner's unpaid tax, which is the protection, and the necessary corollary is that the enforcement route has to run against the mineral interest itself. THAT COROLLARY IS THE THING THIS RECORD CANNOT ANSWER, and the page says so rather than implying it: chapter 140, the delinquent taxes and tax sale chapter, was not read, so what actually happens to a Missouri severed mineral interest in arrears, and whether a surface owner can acquire it that way, is unknown here. Iowa and Nevada are the states on this record where the tax route has been read through to the end, and both of them end in the interest changing hands.

Mont. Code Ann. § 82-10-502

Montana's Surface Owner Damage and Disruption Compensation Act defines an oil and gas estate as an estate in or ownership of all or part of the oil and gas underlying a specified tract of land, and separately defines the surface owner as the person who holds record title to, or a purchaser's interest in, the surface. The two definitions sit beside each other and assume the two estates can be in different hands.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 82-10-502 in the Montana Code Annotated on the Legislature's own site, which stamps every page Montana Code Annotated 2025. Note the scope: these definitions govern that part of the code, which is the surface damage part, and are not a general statement of Montana property law. The same section defines the oil and gas developer or operator as the person who acquires the oil and gas lease for the purpose of extracting oil and gas, and defines lost land value as the value of the highest and best reasonably available use of the land directly used by operations, other than uses appurtenant to the mineral estate. Like New Mexico's pair of definitions this identifies the surface owner out of the record rather than by occupation, and the phrase "purchaser's interest" extends it to someone buying under contract. What is not on this record is the character of a severed Montana mineral estate in general property law, or any Montana authority on what the word minerals reaches in a particular deed.

Neb. Rev. Stat. § 57-227

No estate or interest in land or minerals, including a royalty interest, is subject to foreclosure or otherwise affected by virtue of any lien for taxes against any other estate or interest in the same land or minerals owned by another person, firm or corporation.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 57-227, which is one sentence long and does more work than its length suggests. It settles that a severed Nebraska mineral or royalty interest survives a tax foreclosure aimed at the surface, and that the surface survives a foreclosure aimed at the minerals. Hold it against Michigan, where a dormant mineral interest is expressly not spared by tax foreclosure, and the contrast is direct. What it does not do is make the mineral interest safe generally: Nebraska's dormant mineral act can still extinguish it, and this section says nothing about a tax lien against the mineral interest itself. WHAT IS NOT READ: how a severed interest is valued for tax once it is on the list, and what happens when the tax on the mineral interest itself goes unpaid.

Neb. Rev. Stat. § 57-236

Any owner of the surface estate from which a mineral interest has been severed, or the owner of the severed mineral interest, may apply to the county assessor of the county where the surface lies to place that severed mineral interest on the county tax list. The applicant pays for it, and must give the assessor proof of ownership and a record of the creation of the severed interest as shown by the records of the county clerk or register of deeds, including the owner or owners' names and last known addresses, the ownership interest and any fractional interest, and the legal description, in the form of an attorney's opinion or a certificate prepared by a licensed abstracter.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 57-236. Two things make this worth a rule of its own. It is the only provision on this record that lets the SURFACE owner force somebody else's mineral interest onto the tax roll, at the surface owner's own expense, which is an odd thing to want until it is read next to the dormant mineral act: an interest on the tax roll has a name and a last known address attached to it, which is what a surface owner needs to name defendants in a suit under section 57-228. And the omission the pair creates is the sharp part. Paying tax on the interest is not one of the three acts that saves it from abandonment under section 57-229. So a Nebraska mineral owner can be listed, assessed and paying, and still lose the interest for not having recorded anything or produced anything in twenty-three years. Indiana answers the same question the opposite way and counts paying the tax as a use. WHAT IS NOT READ: sections 57-237 and 57-238 on the separate listing and the appeal from it, and how the interest is valued.

NRS 362.050, Affidavit of labor: requirement for exemption of surface of patented mine or mining claim from taxation

Nevada splits the mine from the ground above it for tax purposes, and it does so at constitutional level rather than by anybody's deed. Because Section 5 of Article 10 of the state constitution provides for taxing the net proceeds of a mine rather than the mine itself, the county assessor assesses only the SURFACE of each patented mine and mining claim. Even that assessment comes off the roll on an affidavit: to obtain the exemption of the surface from ad valorem taxation the owner records an affidavit with the county recorder, on or before 30 December, showing that at least one hundred dollars in development work was actually performed on the claim during the federal mining assessment work period ending within the year before the fiscal year assessed. On receiving it the assessor excludes the assessment against that claim.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at NRS 362.030, 362.040 and 362.050 on 2026-08-01. This is the nearest thing Nevada has to the mechanisms the rest of this record is built around, and it is worth seeing the shape rather than the label: it is a do-the-work-or-pay-the-tax rule, resting on the constitution, and the work it measures is the FEDERAL mining assessment work, which is the clearest sign on the page of how far Nevada's private mineral title depends on the federal system. What it is not is a forfeiture. Failing to file the affidavit does not cost the owner the claim; it costs them the exemption, and the surface goes back on the roll. Nevada's constitution itself was not fetched for this record, so Article 10 section 5 is named here as the statute names it and is not quoted.

RSA 155-E:1, Definitions

New Hampshire defines the substance rather than the estate. Earth means sand, gravel, rock, soil or construction aggregate produced by quarrying, crushing or any other mining activity, or such other naturally occurring unconsolidated materials that normally mask the bedrock. An excavation means a land area which is used, or has been used, for the commercial taking of earth, including all slopes. An excavation site means any area of contiguous land in common ownership on which excavation takes place, and an excavation area means the surface area within a site where excavation has occurred or is eligible to occur. And then the exclusion that matters most in this state. Dimension stone means rock that is cut, shaped or selected for use in blocks, slabs, sheets or other construction units of specified shapes or sizes and used for external or interior parts of buildings, foundations, curbing, paving, flagging, bridges, revetments, or for other architectural or engineering purposes, including quarry blocks from which sections of dimension stone are to be produced. Dimension stone does not include earth as defined in the same section.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at RSA 155-E:1 on 2026-08-03. Two things follow and the second is the reason this rule is on the page at all. The definition is functional and physical rather than economic: it turns on what the material IS and on the fact that it normally masks the bedrock, which is a geologist's test rather than a lawyer's, and it is the opposite end of the spectrum from Maine, read the same day, which defines a metallic mineral by whether a metal is the ECONOMICALLY VALUABLE CONSTITUENT regardless of the chemical end product. AND DIMENSION STONE IS OUT. Rock cut or selected for building blocks, slabs, curbing, paving, flagging, bridges or revetments is expressly not earth, so in the state whose nickname is the Granite State the granite that gets quarried in blocks falls outside the excavation permit regime in this chapter and outside the two cent per cubic yard excavation tax that RSA 72-B builds on the same definition. Crushed rock is earth; a cut block of the same rock is not. Compare how other states here draw their line. Hawaii lists substances and then excludes the sand, rock and gravel used in general construction, which is most of what Hawaii digs. Maine includes only metallic minerals. New Hampshire includes what those two exclude and excludes what New Hampshire is famous for. WHAT IS NOT READ: RSA 12-E, Mining and Reclamation, which is a separate chapter in a different title and may reach dimension stone; and whether any statute governs the severance of a mineral estate in New Hampshire at all, which nothing read answers.

RSA 72-B:2, Definitions

New Hampshire's tax statute defines owner in three limbs, and the second is the one that recognises a severed interest. Owner means any person who owns the land upon which earth is excavated; a previous owner who retains earth excavation rights to the land, or any person who has purchased earth excavation rights, and has registered a claim with the registry of deeds; or any person who has purchased excavated earth or excavation rights on public lands, or removes earth from a public right of way. So the interest that can be split off from a New Hampshire parcel is not called a mineral estate and is not called minerals: it is an earth excavation right, it can be retained by a seller or bought by a stranger, and the condition on which the holder becomes the taxpayer rather than the landowner is that they have registered a claim with the registry of deeds. The excavation tax is then assessed against the owner so defined, at two cents per cubic yard, by the local assessing officials within thirty days after they receive a report of excavated material.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at RSA 72-B:2, VIII on 2026-08-03, with the assessment at 72-B:4. This is as close as New Hampshire law read here comes to acknowledging a severed interest in what is under the ground, and the shape of it is worth noticing precisely because it is not the shape every other state on this record uses. Elsewhere the severed thing is a mineral estate, an interest in land, and the recording system decides priority between competing claims to it. Here the severed thing is a RIGHT TO EXCAVATE EARTH, and registration at the registry of deeds is written into a TAX definition, where its function is to identify the person who owes two cents a cubic yard. Nothing read says what a registered claim looks like, what it must contain, or what happens between two people who both claim excavation rights. The limb also does something useful for a landowner who sold the right and kept the land: a PREVIOUS OWNER WHO RETAINS earth excavation rights is an owner for the tax, so retaining the right retains the liability. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether any New Hampshire statute governs the creation of such a right, how it is conveyed, whether it can lapse, and whether the registry keeps any separate index of them. Chapter 477 was read in full and does not mention them.

N.J.S.A. § 46:3-27, with §§ 46:3-13 and 46:3-16

N.J.S.A. 46:3-27 is a rule of deed construction written for minerals specifically, in a state with almost no extraction, and it decides a question that has produced litigation elsewhere. Every deed or other instrument which conveys or reserves mineral rights in any land shall, UNLESS OTHERWISE EXPRESSLY PROVIDED THEREIN, be construed to exclude any and all water rights or consideration thereof from the conveyance or reservation. So whoever reserved the minerals under a New Jersey parcel did not thereby reserve the water, and a mineral owner who wants water has to have said so in the instrument. This is not the same thing as the water savings clauses that appear elsewhere on this record. Connecticut, Maryland and Utah each provide that their DORMANT MINERAL statute does not affect water rights, which is a carve-out from a lapse regime; Idaho provides that an integration order does not inhibit claims for damage to water rights. The state that actually reaches the same destination is South Dakota, and it goes by a different road: its statute defines MINERAL itself to exclude water, so a South Dakota mineral estate never contains the water in the first place, by definition and for every purpose. New Jersey leaves the definition alone and works on the instrument: the deed or reservation is CONSTRUED to exclude water rights unless it expressly says otherwise, so New Jersey's parties can put the water into a mineral conveyance by writing it in, which is exactly what South Dakota's definition does not obviously allow. New Jersey's rule applies to every mineral deed and every mineral reservation in the State whether or not anything else is going on. Around it sit the general construction rules of the same chapter, all read. N.J.S.A. 46:3-13 construes every deed conveying lands, unless an exception is made in it, to include all the estate, right, title, interest, use, possession, property, claim and demand of the grantor both at law and in equity including the fee simple if he had one, and abolishes any need for the word heirs. N.J.S.A. 46:3-16 construes every deed conveying land, unless an exception is made, to include the buildings, improvements, ways, woods, WATERS, watercourses, rights, liberties, privileges, hereditaments and appurtenances belonging to it, with the reversions, remainders, rents, issues and profits. Read those two together with 46:3-27 and the shape is clear: a deed carries everything unless excepted, water travels with the land by default, and a mineral instrument is the one case where the statute reverses the presumption and keeps the water out unless the parties put it in.

Checked August 5, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from N.J.S.A. 46:3-27, with 46:3-13 and 46:3-16, on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 3 of Title 46 walked end to end through the Previous and Next chain, thirty-eight sections, END OF CHAIN reached at 46:3-33 and 46:3-34 probed and confirmed absent on the body. The word mineral appears three times in the whole chapter: twice in this section and once in 46:3-29, which is dealt with separately on this page. The original check for comparable rules read the four states whose files use the phrase WATER RIGHTS, Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland and Utah, and all four are savings clauses in a different context. The 2026-08-05 audit found what that phrase-match missed: South Dakota excludes water from the DEFINITION of mineral itself, worded excluding water rather than water rights, and reaches the same practical result by a different mechanism. A closed set built by searching for one phrasing is only as good as the phrasing, which is the same lesson the aggregation correction on this page already teaches.

N.M. Stat. Ann. § 70-2-33(E)

New Mexico's Oil and Gas Act defines the owner as the person who has the right to drill into and produce from a pool and to appropriate the production, which locates the mineral interest in the right to develop rather than in possession of the ground.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at the definitions section of the Oil and Gas Act. Note the scope: this is the definition used in that Act, so it governs the conservation and pooling machinery rather than standing as a general statement of New Mexico property law. It is recorded because it is the clearest statutory statement found in this pass on what the mineral side of a split estate consists of, and because it pairs with the surface owner definition in the Surface Owners Protection Act to show the split in statute. The official text at nmonesource.com could not be extracted, so this is quoted from an allowlisted mirror that states it is current as of January 1, 2024; anything enacted after that date is not reflected here.

N.M. Stat. Ann. § 70-12-3(D)

For the Surface Owners Protection Act a surface owner is a person holding legal or equitable title, as shown in the records of the county clerk, to the surface of the property on which the operator has the legal right to conduct oil and gas operations. The definition assumes the two estates are in different hands.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at the definitions section of the Surface Owners Protection Act. The definition is doing two things worth separating. It identifies the surface owner by the county record rather than by possession or occupation, which matters because the Act's notice duties run to that person. And its closing words assume the operator already has the legal right to conduct operations on that land, which is the split estate stated as a premise rather than argued for. The same section defines reclaim as substantially restoring the affected surface to the condition that existed before operations, or as otherwise agreed in writing. Quoted from an allowlisted mirror stating it is current as of January 1, 2024, because the official copy would not extract.

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. Five states on this record now 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. UPDATED 2026-08-01: this note said three, and Alabama and Washington had each made that stale. 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. Alabama gives three sixteenths free of every cost. Washington deems an unleased owner one eighth free of all costs, or the higher basic royalty where the unit has established one. 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 five 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.C. Gen. Stat. s. 113-423(b), Required lease terms, Maximum Duration

North Carolina puts a statutory end date on the instrument itself. Any lease of oil or gas rights, or any other conveyance of any kind separating rights to oil or gas from the freehold estate of surface property, expires at the end of ten years from the date it was executed unless oil or gas is then being produced for commercial purposes from the land. If at any time after that ten years commercial production stops for six months or more, all rights to the oil or gas revert to the SURFACE OWNER of the property. Production is defined to include injection, withdrawal, storage or disposal operations and the payment of rentals or royalties, so a paying lessee is safe. No assignment or agreement waiving the subsection is valid or enforceable, and no force majeure clause operates to extend a lease past those limits.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at G.S. 113-423(b) on 2026-08-02, from chapter 113 Article 27 fetched whole at 115,948 characters. Read the words the subsection reaches, because they are wider than the word lease: any other conveyance of any kind separating rights to oil or gas from the freehold estate of surface property. On its face that is not confined to leases at all, and how far it reaches an outright severance deed is exactly the question a North Carolina lawyer would be asked; nothing was read that answers it and this record does not guess. Two consequences are worth stating anyway. Where it applies, the destination is the surface owner rather than the person the rights were carved out of, which is the opposite of Indiana and Iowa. And it runs on the CALENDAR and on production, not on any notice: nobody serves anything, nobody records anything, and the ten years pass whatever the parties intended. The anti-waiver sentence and the force majeure sentence were both read twice because a clause of that kind is usually softened somewhere else in the section, and neither is. The subsection was enacted by S.L. 2012-143 and last touched by S.L. 2025-25.

N.C. Gen. Stat. s. 1-42.1(d), listing and taxation of severed interests

Every one of the nine extinguishment sections carries the same second limb, and it outlives the windows that have closed. Oil, gas and mineral interests severed from the surface fee must be listed for ad valorem taxes, and notice of the interest must be filed in writing and recorded in the register of deeds book that G.S. 1-42 provides, to be effective against the surface fee owner or that owner's creditors, purchasers, heirs or assigns. Subsurface oil, gas and mineral interests are then to be assessed for ad valorem taxes as real property, and those taxes are to be collected and foreclosed in the manner authorised by chapter 105 of the General Statutes.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read on 2026-08-02 at G.S. 1-42.1(d), and the same sentence appears in the corresponding subsection of 1-42.2, 1-42.3, 1-42.4, 1-42.6, 1-42.7, 1-42.8 and 1-42.9. It is the practical answer to what can still move a North Carolina mineral interest today, since the extinguishment windows in those same sections are shut: the interest carries its own tax bill and can be foreclosed for its own arrears. That puts North Carolina with Iowa and Minnesota, which also assess a severed interest separately, and against Alabama, which takes it off the roll permanently for a single payment. Be careful about the reach of the recording half of this sentence. It is drafted as a condition of effectiveness against the surface owner and those claiming under them, which is a different thing from extinguishment, and the county limitation described in the rule above applies to this subsection in the first four sections. The chapter 105 foreclosure machinery itself was not read, so nothing here describes what notice the mineral owner gets, what a sale costs, or whether the surface owner has any right to redeem, and no rate or valuation method for a nonproducing severed interest was found.

N.C. Gen. Stat. s. 113-425, Registry of landmen required

Before any oil and gas lease, or any other conveyance separating oil or gas rights from the freehold, is executed, the developer or operator or any agent of theirs must give the lessor a copy of the statutory Part and a publication produced by the Consumer Protection Division of the Department of Justice called Oil and Gas Leases, Landowners' Rights, and must give both to the surface owner as well where the lessor is somebody else. A separate section makes the Department of Justice, in consultation with the North Carolina Real Estate Commission, develop that publication and keep it updated. And a third makes the Department of Environmental Quality establish and maintain a registry of landmen: nobody may act, offer to act, or hold themselves out as a landman in the state unless registered, with landman defined by four functions including negotiating for the acquisition or divestiture of oil or gas rights.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at G.S. 113-425, 113-426 and 113-423(a) on 2026-08-02, and the registry was then read on the Department's own page the same day, where 109 individuals and companies are listed by name with a link to the first page of each application, the second page withheld as confidential. This is the only provision on this record that regulates the person who knocks on the door rather than the operator who drills. Registration may be denied, suspended or revoked, or a civil penalty imposed, for fraudulently or deceptively obtaining a registration, using an expired, suspended or revoked one, falsely representing oneself as registered, engaging in any other fraud, deception, misrepresentation or knowing omission of material facts related to oil or gas interests, or having a similar licence denied, suspended or revoked in another jurisdiction, and an applicant may challenge the decision. The application requires the applicant's name, or the names and addresses of all principals where it is not an individual, business contact details, a social security or federal employer identification number, and a list of the other jurisdictions where the applicant operates. What was not read: the contents of the Landowners' Rights publication itself, and whether the registry is checked or enforced against anybody.

N.D.C.C. § 38-18.1-01

North Dakota defines a mineral interest for the purposes of its termination chapter as any interest in oil, gas, coal, clay, gravel, uranium and all other minerals of any kind and nature, however the interest was created, that is owned by a person other than the owner of the surface estate.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 38-18.1-01. Two features matter. The definition is by inclusion rather than exhaustive enumeration, and it names coal among the minerals reached, which is the opposite of Ohio, where coal is expressly exempt from the equivalent machinery. And the definition is framed by who holds the interest rather than by its technical form: what makes it a mineral interest for this chapter is that somebody other than the surface owner owns it. As with the equivalent Ohio definition, this governs the chapter it sits in rather than standing as a general definition of a severed estate in North Dakota law, and no North Dakota authority on the character of a severed mineral estate outside this chapter has been fetched.

N.D.C.C. § 57-51-02.1

For the purposes the section names, North Dakota's gross production tax is a real property tax on oil-producing and gas-producing mineral estates and interests, which is a statutory characterisation of the severed producing interest as real property rather than as a licence or a contract right.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 57-51-02.1 in the Century Code chapter PDF for chapter 57-51. The characterisation is expressly made for the purposes of interpreting a 1987 session law relating to federal land bank taxation and to the taxation of other governmental entities whose immunity has been waived, so it is recorded here with that limit visible rather than as a general statement of North Dakota property law. It is included because it is the only statutory statement found in this pass on what kind of property a producing severed interest is, and because it explains why the production tax reaches the royalty interest rather than only the operator.

R.C. 5301.56(A)(3)

Ohio defines a mineral interest for the purposes of its Dormant Mineral Act as a fee interest in at least one mineral, regardless of how the interest was created and of its form, which may be absolute or fractional and divided or undivided.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 5301.56(A)(3). Note the scope limiter: this is the definition as used in that section, so it governs the abandonment machinery rather than standing as a general Ohio definition of a mineral estate. It is recorded here because it settles two things that matter for the lapse question, that the interest reached is a fee interest rather than a lease or a bare royalty, and that a fractional or undivided share is reached just as a whole one is. What this record has not read is any Ohio authority on the character of a severed mineral estate outside this statutory definition.

R.C. 5301.56(A)(4)

For the purposes of Ohio's Dormant Mineral Act a mineral is gas, oil, coal, coalbed methane gas, other gaseous, liquid and solid hydrocarbons, sand, gravel, clay, shale, gypsum, halite, limestone, dolomite, sandstone, other stone, metalliferous or nonmetalliferous ore, or another material of commercial value excavated in a solid state from natural deposits on or in the earth.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 5301.56(A)(4). This breadth is worth having in front of a reader because the abandonment machinery follows it: an interest in sand, gravel, limestone or shale is a mineral interest for these purposes and can be deemed abandoned on the same terms as one in oil and gas, while coal alone is exempted elsewhere in the framework. This site has no source on whether the word minerals in any particular Ohio deed or reservation carries the same breadth, which is a question of construing that instrument and is not answered here.

16 O.S. § 76(D)

Oklahoma defines a severed mineral interest in statute to include mineral leasehold and working interests, mineral royalty and overriding royalty interests, and ownership of the minerals with no interest in the surface at all beyond the rights of ingress and egress and use of the surface for mineral development and exploration.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the Oklahoma Legislature's own complete-title PDF for Title 16, which the legislature's statutes index states was last updated November 18, 2025. The definition is written for the marketable record title sections but it is the clearest statutory statement on this record of what a severed Oklahoma mineral interest consists of, and it settles two things at once: that the interest can exist with no surface ownership whatever, and that surface access for development travels with it as of right rather than by agreement. Note the scope limiter in the section's own words, "As used in this section", so this is the definition for Sections 71 through 80 rather than a general definition for all of Oklahoma law.

16 O.S. § 67(A)

Where the owner of a severed mineral interest in Oklahoma real estate has died, a person claiming that interest through a recorded affidavit of death and heirship acquires marketable title to it against adverse claimants, provided the statutory conditions are met, and so does a purchaser for value buying from such a claimant.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the same complete-title PDF. Subsection C sets the conditions and they are strict: the affidavit or recital must state that the decedent died without a will, or that a will was never probated in Oklahoma with a copy attached, or that the will was probated but the severed mineral interest was omitted from the final decree with the will and decree attached; it must list the heirs and their relationship to the decedent; and the maker must state that they are related to the decedent or otherwise have personal knowledge of the facts. The section is worth having because inherited severed minerals are the single most common way an Oklahoma mineral interest ends up with a clouded record, and this is the statutory route to clearing it. The remaining conditions in subsection C beyond those listed here were not read in full.

ORS s. 273.787, Release and transfer of mineral or geothermal resource rights

Low-potential resource real property means real property located inside an urban growth boundary, or within an area zoned for residential use on a lot or parcel that is three acres or smaller. For such property, the Department of State Lands may not reserve mineral and geothermal resource rights in land the state sells or exchanges, unless it determines that a significant mineral or geothermal resource exists there. And where rights were reserved by the state before June 4, 2013, the owner, meaning the record holder of fee title or the contract purchaser, may apply at any time for their release and transfer. On that application the department shall release and transfer the reserved rights to the owner within sixty days of receiving the completed application, unless it determines a significant resource exists. The department may not require the owner to obtain an appraisal, and may not require the owner to pay for one conducted at the department's own request. The fee to process the application may not exceed one hundred and fifty dollars.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at ORS 273.787 on 2026-08-02. [2003 c.676 s.3; 2013 c.256 s.2], and the 2013 act is what turned a power into a duty and put the clock on it. Two other states on this record let a state mineral reservation be released and neither works like this. Florida's Fla. Stat. 270.11 lets the reserving body sell or release the reserved interest on the owner's own application with a statement of reasons justifying it, which is discretionary. Hawaii's HRS 182-2(a) lets the board release, cancel or waive the reservation whenever it deems a land use other than mining of greater benefit to the State, which is also discretionary. Oregon's says SHALL, fixes sixty days, forbids an appraisal requirement, and caps the fee. It is also the only one on this record that draws its eligibility line by zoning and lot size rather than by the merits of the particular parcel. Note what the release is NOT: it is confined to low-potential resource real property, so it does nothing for rural acreage, and the department keeps an escape in the significant-resource finding, which nothing read defines. WHAT IS NOT READ: the department's rules under subsection (7), the application form, how many releases have been made, and what significant means.

ORS s. 273.780, Retention of mineral and geothermal resource rights by state

Mineral and geothermal resource rights in real property owned by any state agency, and mineral and geothermal resource rights retained as an interest in lands previously sold, granted or otherwise conveyed by the state or any agency of it, are property of the State of Oregon. Proceeds from them accrue to the Common School Fund, and the State Land Board is the state agency acting in any transaction respecting them. Those rights are subject to exploration permit or lease by the Department of State Lands. And they are retained by the state in the absence of a finding by the State Land Board, on adequate facts presented to it, that their sale or exchange is for the purpose of obtaining the greatest benefit for the people of this state consistent with the conservation of lands under its jurisdiction. Mineral for these sections is defined widely, running from oil, gas, sulfur and coal through gold, silver, copper, lead, cinnabar, iron and manganese to any other solid, liquid or gaseous material excavated or otherwise developed for commercial, industrial or construction use from natural deposits, and expressly including mineral waters of all kinds. Separately, the Department of State Lands must establish and maintain a registry of the mineral and geothermal resource rights placed under the State Land Board's jurisdiction.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at ORS 273.775, 273.780, 273.785 and 273.790 on 2026-08-02. The phrase to notice is RETAINED AS AN INTEREST IN LANDS PREVIOUSLY SOLD, GRANTED OR OTHERWISE CONVEYED, which is the sentence that reaches private land: if the state kept the minerals when it parted with the surface, whenever that was, the minerals are still the state's and the Common School Fund gets the proceeds. Unlike Alaska, Washington and Hawaii, nothing read here writes a reservation into every conveyance of state land automatically, so whether a particular Oregon parcel is subject to one is a question about the deed rather than about the statute; ORS 273.780(3) makes retention the default going forward, but that is a policy about future transactions, not a term implied into past ones. The exclusions in 273.785 are worth knowing because they are ordinary things: soil, clay, stone, sand and gravel that state agencies acquire or use for constructing or repairing roads or other state facilities are outside these sections, as are mineral or geothermal rights the State Fish and Wildlife Commission acquires under certain agreements. WHAT IS NOT READ: the registry itself under 273.790, whether it is published or searchable, and how a private owner queries it.

ORS s. 522.035, Ownership rights

Ownership rights to geothermal resources are in the owner of the surface property underlain by the resources, unless those rights have been otherwise reserved or conveyed, and nothing in the section divests the people or the state of any rights, title or interest they may have. Whether the chapter reaches a well at all is decided by temperature rather than by substance. The provisions on regulating production from a geothermal reservoir apply only to wells with a bottom hole temperature of at least two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and the provisions on location and drilling do not apply to wells, other than prospect wells, where the fluids produced are of less than that temperature or where the fluids have been appropriated under the ground water statutes. If a well that was initially at least two hundred and fifty degrees falls below it, the State Geologist and the Water Resources Director, after consulting the well owner, determine which agency has regulatory responsibility for that specific well, and the determination is documented in writing and supersedes the general rule.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at ORS 522.035 and 522.025 on 2026-08-02. Hawaii is the only other state on this record whose statutes address who owns geothermal, and it goes the other way: HRS 182-1 makes all geothermal resources a mineral by definition and 182-2 reserves the minerals under state lands and reserved lands to the State. Oregon starts from the surface owner and lets the split be made by instrument. Note that ORS 273.775 pairs mineral and geothermal resource rights throughout for state lands, so on land the state kept, the two travel together. The temperature line is the thing to take away, because it decides which agency, which permit and which body of law: at or above two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit at the bottom of the hole it is geothermal and DOGAMI has it, and below that it is ground water and the Water Resources Department has it. WHAT IS NOT READ: any Oregon decision on whether a general mineral reservation carries geothermal with it, which is a real and contested question elsewhere and which this record cannot answer for Oregon.

Dormant Oil and Gas Act, Act of Jul. 11, 2006, P.L. 1134, No. 115, § 3

For the Dormant Oil and Gas Act, gas means natural gas and all other volatile hydrocarbons not defined as oil, including condensate, but expressly does not include methane gas contained within or produced from underground coal beds or mined out coal mine areas. A royalty interest is defined as an interest in an oil or gas lease entitling the owner to share in production or in the proceeds of a lease without the obligation to pay any costs of production.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 3 of the act. Two things are worth separating. The coalbed methane exclusion is the first provision on this record that carves one substance out of the word gas, and it matters in a state where coal and gas are frequently in different hands; it means the trust machinery in this act does not reach a coalbed methane interest. The royalty interest definition is the clearest statutory statement of what a royalty is that this record has found in any state: the entitlement to share in production or proceeds WITHOUT the obligation to pay costs of production, which is the whole difference between a royalty and a working interest. Both definitions govern this act only and are not general statements of Pennsylvania property law. What the word minerals reaches in a Pennsylvania deed or reservation, and in particular whether a reservation of minerals includes oil and gas, is a question of decided law that has NOT been read for this record and on which nothing here should be inferred.

R.I. Gen. Laws § 34-11-1, Conveyances required to be in writing and recorded

Nothing read for this record ends a Rhode Island mineral interest because nobody used it, and nothing read creates, governs or names one either. There is no dormant mineral act. There is no mining chapter, no oil and gas chapter and no quarrying chapter. There is no provision defining minerals, no provision about severing them from the surface, and no provision about what happens when the two estates are in different hands. The more useful finding for anybody about to go searching is what Rhode Island does have where a mineral provision would sit: a general estates chapter, a conveyancing chapter with statutory short forms of deed, a recording chapter, and a marketable record title act that can end an old interest by never mentioning it. Anything that can move a Rhode Island mineral interest is therefore something that can move any interest in land: a conveyance, a tax sale, ten years of adverse possession, or a forty year record chain that does not disclose it.

Checked August 3, 2026. Established on 2026-08-03 by enumeration with controls and then by full-text reading, and not by any search. LAYER ONE, THE WHOLE CODE AT CHAPTER LEVEL. All 48 titles of the General Laws were fetched one by one and parsed into 2,781 chapter names. MINERAL returns 0. MINING 0. QUARRY 0. DORMANT 0. EARTH 0. SAND 0. GRAVEL 0. SEVER returns 1 and it is a chapter about severely disabled elderly residents. MARKETABLE returns 1 and it is the chapter dealt with above. The controls are heavy: TAX 103, LAND 273, RECORD 20. LAYER TWO, THE THREE CHAPTERS WHERE A SEVERANCE PROVISION WOULD LIVE, READ END TO END: ch. 34-4 Estates in Real Property, ch. 34-11 Form and Effect of Conveyances, and ch. 34-13 Recording of Instruments, ninety-two sections between them and 93,935 characters. MINERAL returns 0, MINING 0, QUARRY 0, COAL 0, SEVERED 0, SEVERANCE 0 and SUBSURFACE 0, against DEED 121, RECORD 139 and NOTICE 31. THE QUOTE ATTACHED IS THE CONVEYANCING RULE rather than a severance provision, because there is no severance provision to quote, and because it is the section that would have to be satisfied to create such an interest. THE LIMIT OF THE METHOD IS STATED HERE MORE FIRMLY THAN USUAL, and Rhode Island's neighbours are the reason. A chapter-name count over a code cannot exclude a provision inside a chapter whose name does not disclose it, and on the same day this record read Connecticut, where MINERAL returns 0 across 1,114 chapter names and 90 times inside a chapter called Land Titles; Vermont, whose mining law is in a title called Public Property and Supplies; and Massachusetts, whose chapter called Mining Regulation and Reclamation is about coal alone. Rhode Island's negative rests on four chapters read whole rather than on the index, and it is still a negative about what was read.

S.C. Code s. 48-43-380, Lessee's duty to lessor as to termination of oil or gas lease

Where an optional oil and gas lease that is of record lapses, whether because the full period during which it could be kept alive by paying rentals has run out or because the lessee failed to comply with a condition preventing forfeiture, the lessee must on the lessor's written request either direct the cancellation of the lease on the records or supply the lessor with a duly acknowledged instrument doing so. A lessee who fails or refuses to supply that instrument, or who fails or refuses to cancel the lease on the records within thirty days after receiving written demand, is liable to the lessor for a reasonable attorney's fee incurred by the lessor in bringing suit to have the forfeiture and cancellation adjudged. And they are liable in addition for all damages the lessor suffers by reason of being unable to make any lease on account of the first lease not having been cancelled. The section is expressly to be construed to apply to all leases for oil or gas entered into before it existed.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at S.C. Code s. 48-43-380 on 2026-08-03. This is a lease release statute and it is the only thing on this page that gives a South Carolina mineral owner an affirmative remedy. The problem it solves is a real and common one: an expired oil and gas lease that nobody has released still appears in the chain of title, and a prospective new lessee will not pay for ground that looks encumbered. Two features make the remedy worth having rather than nominal. The lessor recovers the attorney fee for the suit, which is what makes a small claim worth bringing at all; and the measure of damages is expressly the inability to make ANY LEASE while the dead one sits on the record, which is loss of opportunity rather than out of pocket cost. Note the trigger: WRITTEN DEMAND, and then thirty days. Nothing happens without the demand, so a South Carolina owner sitting under a lapsed lease has something to do and a deadline that only starts when they do it. Two states here do the same job and neither the mechanism nor the fee shifting is unique to South Carolina. Nebraska requires a lessee whose recorded mineral lease has been forfeited to record a surrender within thirty days without cost to the owner, and if they refuse after a statutory notice the owner may sue and recover one hundred dollars in damages, all costs, a reasonable attorney fee and any additional damages the evidence warrants. Iowa gives the lessee sixty days from forfeiture to record a surrender. What South Carolina adds that neither of those does is the measure of loss: damages for the inability to make ANY lease while the dead one sits on the record, which is lost opportunity rather than a fixed sum. And compare North Carolina from the other end of the same relationship, where every oil and gas lease expires at ten years by statute and reverts to the surface owner six months after commercial production stops. WHAT IS NOT READ: any South Carolina decision on the section, and what counts as an OPTIONAL lease for its purposes.

S.C. Code s. 48-43-315, Application of article to geothermal resources

All the provisions of the oil and gas article regulating the leasing for, exploration for, drilling for, transportation of, and production of oil and gas and their products apply to geothermal resources to the extent possible. The provisions of the article do not apply to wells drilled for water supply only. So South Carolina answers the geothermal question by regulatory extension rather than by classification: it does not say what geothermal IS, and it does not say who owns it, but everything the state does about oil and gas, including spacing, integration and the duty to release a lapsed lease, reaches geothermal so far as it can. The exclusion of water supply wells is the boundary, and it is drawn by the purpose of the well rather than by any temperature or depth.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at S.C. Code s. 48-43-315 on 2026-08-03, added by 1984 Act No. 375. Four states on this record now legislate about geothermal and every one takes a different route. Hawaii's HRS 182-1 defines geothermal as a MINERAL and reserves the minerals under state and reserved lands to the State. Oregon's ORS 522.035 puts ownership in the SURFACE OWNER unless reserved or conveyed. Idaho's 47-1602 declares it SUI GENERIS, neither a mineral resource nor a water resource. South Carolina does none of those things and instead extends an existing regulatory regime to it, which leaves the ownership question entirely open here. Note also how the boundary with water is drawn. Idaho draws it by TEMPERATURE, at two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit at the bottom of the hole, with the State Geologist and the Water Resources Director deciding borderline wells between them. South Carolina draws it by PURPOSE: a well drilled for water supply only is outside the article, and nothing is said about a well drilled for both. The words TO THE EXTENT POSSIBLE are doing unspecified work and this record cannot say how much. WHAT IS NOT READ: who owns geothermal resources under South Carolina land, which nothing read answers.

SDCL 45-5A-3, Definition of terms

The baseline rule is one sentence carried over from the 1877 Civil Code: the owner of land in fee has the right to the surface and to everything permanently situated beneath or above it. Everything else is a departure from that by grant or reservation. When the estates are split, the surface damages act supplies the working definitions, and its definition of a mineral is unusually wide. A mineral is any substance with economic value, whether organic or inorganic, that can be extracted from the earth, including oil and gas, but excluding water. A mineral estate is an estate in or ownership of all or part of the minerals underlying a specified tract; a surface estate is the same for the surface; and a surface owner is the person who has possession of the surface if other than the mineral developer, either as owner or as lessee. That last clause is what lets a tenant claim under the chapter. The abandonment chapter defines the mineral interest it can extinguish separately and by naming substances first, reaching oil, gas, coal, clay, gravel and uranium and then all other minerals of any kind and nature.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read at SDCL 43-16-1 and 45-5A-3 on 2026-08-04, with 43-30A-1 for the second definition. Chapter 43-16 is titled Land Boundaries, Monuments and Subsurface Rights and its subsurface content is that single sentence: the words mineral, oil, gas and coal return zero occurrences across the whole chapter, which is otherwise about lateral support, roads, boundary trees and monuments.

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.

Lightning Oil Co. v. Anadarko E&P Onshore, LLC, No. 15-0910 (Tex. May 19, 2017)

When the owner of a fee simple estate in Texas severs the mineral estate by conveyance, five rights pass to the grantee: the right to develop, the right to lease, the right to receive bonus payments, the right to receive delay rentals, and the right to receive royalty payments. Each can be dealt with separately, which is why a Texas mineral deed can leave a person owning some of those rights and not others.

Checked July 30, 2026. Full opinion fetched from the Supreme Court of Texas's own site as the PDF the court publishes for cause number 15-0910, and read end to end. The opinion was delivered May 19, 2017 by Justice Johnson. The court states the same list a second time later in the opinion as the "five essential attributes" of a severed mineral estate, and attributes it to Hysaw v. Dawkins, 483 S.W.3d 1, 9 (Tex. 2016), which is quoting French v. Chevron U.S.A., Inc., 896 S.W.2d 795, 797 (Tex. 1995); both of those citations are printed in the opinion as given here. The opinion also records that an oil and gas lessee is generally granted only the right to develop, which is the distinction that decides who may authorise a use of the surface. The Southwestern Reporter citation for Lightning Oil itself is deliberately not published here: it does not appear anywhere inside the opinion as fetched, and this site does not print a reporter citation it has only seen in a search result.

Lightning Oil Co. v. Anadarko E&P Onshore, LLC, No. 15-0910 (Tex. May 19, 2017)

Texas recognises the ownership of oil and gas in place as a property right rather than as a bare right to search, and an oil and gas lease gives the lessee a determinable fee in the minerals. That interest carries the exclusive right to possess, use and appropriate the oil and gas.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the same fetched opinion, in the section the court heads "Minerals". The court supports the sentence with Brown, 83 S.W.2d at 940 and with Tex. Co. v. Daugherty, 176 S.W. 717, 720 (Tex. 1915), and adds that the interest includes "the exclusive right to possess, use, and appropriate gas and oil", citing Stephens Cty. v. Mid-Kan. Oil & Gas Co., 254 S.W. 290, 293 (Tex. 1923). Those citations are printed in the opinion in the form given here. The 1915 and 1923 opinions themselves were not fetched, so nothing is quoted from them and no holding of theirs is stated beyond what this opinion says they hold. The same opinion also holds that the surface owner rather than the mineral lessee owns the possessory rights to the subsurface mass, which is the other half of the picture and is why a lessee cannot stop a neighbour drilling through it.

Utah Code § 40-6-20.5

Title to pore space underlying the surface estate is vested in the owner of the surface estate. The section adds that nothing in it is to be interpreted to increase or diminish any property right established under the laws of the state.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 40-6-20.5, enacted in 2022. Pore space is the void in the rock rather than anything in it, and it is the asset that carbon storage and gas storage are built on, so the question of who owns it is now worth real money in a way it was not when these estates were split. This record holds three states on the point and they do not answer alike: Nebraska treats using the pore space as a use that holds a severed mineral interest alive, which assumes the mineral owner has something to use; Utah simply vests title in the surface owner; and Alabama vests it in the surface owner and then adds the sentence Utah's saving clause leaves out, declaring that no earlier agreement conveying or reserving minerals conveyed or reserved the pore space unless it said so in terms about carbon dioxide storage. The saving clause in subsection (2) is the part a lawyer will notice, because it is doing a lot of work in one sentence: the section vests title and then declares that it neither increases nor diminishes any existing property right, which leaves the interaction with an existing severed mineral estate to be argued rather than settled. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether any Utah decision has considered that saving clause, and Wyoming's treatment of pore space, which was not searched for when Wyoming was read.

27 V.S.A. § 308, Mines and quarries

The grantee of a mine, quarry, or of the right of mining and quarrying, in severance from the ownership of the soil, must within thirty days after its execution cause the deed, lease or other instrument to be recorded in a book kept for that purpose in the office where by law a deed of the real estate is required to be recorded. A grantee who fails to do it forfeits fifty dollars to the town, or to the county if the mine, quarry or right is in an unorganized town or gore, recoverable in an action on the statute. Three things follow from the wording. Vermont recognises the severed mineral interest by name and describes it in the old form, as a grant in severance from the ownership of the soil rather than as a mineral estate. The recording of it is not merely permitted but required, on a deadline, which the general recording act does not do for anything else. And the record of it is kept separately from the ordinary land records, in a book kept for that purpose in the same office.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at 27 V.S.A. § 308 on 2026-08-03, in the subchapter headed Manner of Conveying Interests in or Affecting Realty. This is the provision that answers, for Vermont, the first question this site asks of every state, and its shape is unusual in three ways worth separating. FIRST, IT IS A DUTY WITH A DEADLINE. Every other recording provision read for this record is permissive in form: record and you are protected, do not and you are exposed. This one says the grantee SHALL record, within thirty days, and attaches a penalty payable to the town rather than a loss of priority. A Vermont grantee who records on day forty has a perfectly good record title and owes fifty dollars. SECOND, A SEPARATE BOOK. Minnesota is the only other state on this record where a severed mineral interest goes somewhere different from an ordinary deed, and there the split is between the county recorder for abstract land and the registrar of titles for Torrens land, which is a split about the LAND. Vermont's is a split about the INTEREST: the same office, a different book, because of what was conveyed. Whether Vermont town clerks in fact maintain a separate mines and quarries book today was NOT established, and a searcher should ask rather than assume; the statute is what was read. THIRD, THE COMPANION IN THE TAX CODE. 32 V.S.A. § 3604 provides that the interest of a grantee in severance from surface ownership in mines, quarries or the right of mining and quarrying SHALL BE SET IN THE LIST AS REAL ESTATE, using the same phrase, so the severed interest is separately assessed in its own right on the town grand list. Vermont is a fourth answer here on how property tax meets a severed interest: Alabama takes it off the roll for good in exchange for a few cents an acre, Minnesota bills it every year at forty cents an acre minimum, Iowa assesses it at not less than five cents an acre, and Vermont simply sets it in the list as real estate at no stated rate or minimum. That matters in Vermont more than it would elsewhere, because 29 V.S.A. § 563(e)(4) makes payment of taxes on an oil and gas interest one of the five things that count as USE and so save it from abandonment. WHAT IS NOT READ: how such an interest is valued for the grand list, whether the fifty dollar forfeiture is ever pursued, and whether any Vermont decision construes § 308.

29 V.S.A. § 302, Right of discoverer to work claim

All mines or quarries discovered upon any public land belonging to the people of the State, or upon land beneath public waters, are the property of the people of this State in their right of sovereignty. A citizen of the United States who discovers a valuable mine or quarry on such land and files a notice of discovery and a bond may work it, and that person and their heirs and assigns have the sole benefit of all the product, on payment into the State Treasury of two percent of the market value of all such products as a royalty, valued when the products are first in a marketable form. The Legislature may from time to time provide for a different rate. A statement of the amount sold or removed and of all trees cut or destroyed must be made semiannually under oath to the State Treasurer, and the royalty paid semiannually on the basis of it; a wilful falsehood in that statement forfeits to the State the value of the whole amount mined or quarried during the period the statement covers. No entry, breaking up of the land, working of a mine or quarry or removal of minerals is permitted without the prior written consent of the Commissioner of Buildings and General Services, who may also give written permission to erect buildings. Timber may not be cut except what is actually necessary to uncover the mine or make a road to it, and what is cut is paid for at a value the Commissioner of Forests, Parks and Recreation declares, never less than five dollars per thousand for merchantable timber. Failure to pay when due, or to file a required bond, terminates the claimant's rights and those of everyone holding under them. The chapter does not apply to State forests and parks, and it does not affect grants made by the Legislature before 28 January 1911.

Checked August 3, 2026. All eight sections of 29 V.S.A. ch. 9 were fetched and read on 2026-08-03. This is a second nineteenth and early twentieth century prospector's regime on this record and it is worth reading directly against the first. Missouri's chapter 444 hands a stranger three exclusive years and a right of way on land in private hands, at a royalty set by what the neighbours pay. Vermont's reaches only PUBLIC land and land beneath public waters, and it fixes the royalty in the statute at two percent of market value, valued when the product is first in a marketable form, with the Legislature reserving the right to change it. So the two states answer the same question at opposite ends: Missouri delegates the rate to local custom and Vermont writes it down. TWO PROVISIONS DO REAL WORK AND ARE EASY TO SKIM PAST. The forfeiture in § 303 is not of the underpaid royalty but of the value of the WHOLE amount mined or quarried during the period a false statement covers, which is a penalty of a different order from an interest charge. And § 304 makes the whole permission conditional on the prior written consent of the Commissioner of Buildings and General Services, so § 302's grant to a discoverer is not self-executing: filing a notice and a bond does not by itself entitle anybody to break ground. Note also that the discoverer must be a CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES, which is a condition no other extraction provision read for this record imposes. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether any notice of discovery has ever been filed, whether the Commissioner has published any procedure for consenting, how much public land in Vermont this could reach given the § 308 exclusion of State forests and parks, and whether the two percent has in fact ever been changed by the Legislature since 1911. The chapter is on the books; nothing read establishes that it is used.

Va. Code § 45.2-1621

No conveyance, reservation or exception of coal is deemed to include coalbed methane gas. The section does not affect a coal operator's right to vent coalbed methane for safety purposes or to release it in connection with mining operations, and it does not disturb any settlement of a dispute, or any judgment or governmental order, about the ownership or development of coalbed methane made or entered into before April 13, 2010.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 45.2-1621. This is a rule of construction for mineral instruments in a single sentence, and it is the second one this record holds: Kentucky's constitution presumes what an old severance meant about the METHOD of coal extraction, and Virginia's code settles what a coal conveyance does not reach at all. Both matter for the same reason, which is that the instruments in question are old and were drafted before anybody was arguing about the gas in the seam. Note the limits, because they are real. The section is prospective in effect on disputes: settlements, judgments and governmental orders made before April 13, 2010 are untouched, which is a substantial carve-out in a coalfield where the ownership fight is older than the section. And it says nothing about who does own the coalbed methane, only who does not get it by owning the coal. Virginia's answer to the ownership fight itself is procedural rather than substantive: the Gas and Oil Board force-pools the unit and the royalties go into escrow until the coal claimant and the gas claimant sort it out. That machinery is in this state's gaps rather than on this page.

Va. Code § 45.2-402

Except as the deed the mineral owner takes title under provides otherwise, the owner of minerals is presumed to own the shell, container chamber, passage or space opened underground for the removal of the minerals, with a full right to haul and transport minerals from other lands through it and to pass people, materials, equipment, water and air through it, and no injunction lies to stop that use. For the coal mineral estate specifically, unless the instrument creating the ownership or lease expressly excepts it, the coal owner or lessee keeps the right to any coal left in place after the surrounding coal is removed, and the right to use the void the removal created. Inside a current mine permit that void may be used for activity related to removing coal from any permitted lands; in a sealed mine with no permit left, only with the void owner's consent, which may not be unreasonably withheld once reasonable compensation has been offered, judged against what other mine void leases in the area pay. None of the void provisions bears on ownership of natural gas or coalbed methane.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 45.2-402, in the chapter Virginia titles "Presumptions Regarding Ownership". This is the only presumption on this record that names the space a mine leaves behind and says who owns it. That sentence used to read "no other state on this record answers who owns the space a mine leaves behind", and Alabama is why it no longer does: Alabama defines pore space as subsurface space that can be used for the geologic storage of carbon dioxide and vests it in the surface owner, which reaches a worked-out seam if the seam is space of that kind, and is a different question answered a different way. It is not an academic question either way: a worked-out seam is a haulage route, a ventilation path and a storage volume, and somebody owns it. Three things are worth separating. The presumption is defeasible by the deed, so it is a default and not a rule. The coal-specific subsection was added in 2012 and reaches further than the general presumption, because it gives the coal owner the remnant coal as well as the void. And the last subsection says in terms that none of this has any bearing on ownership of natural gas or coalbed methane, which is the fight the rule above is about, so the two provisions are deliberately kept apart. Contracts in effect on July 1, 2012 that prohibit such use, or that pay the lessor for it, are preserved.

RCW 79.11.210, Reservation in contract

Washington severed the minerals under a great deal of its land by statute rather than by anybody's deed. Every contract for the sale of state land and every deed to state land has to contain a reservation the statute sets out word for word, keeping to the state forever all oils, gases, coal, ores, minerals and fossils of every name, kind or description, the right to explore for them, and the right to enter at any and all times to open, develop and work mines, erect buildings, machinery, roads and railroads, sink shafts, remove soil and occupy as much of the land as is necessary or convenient. The same section then limits the state: no right under the reservation may be exercised until provision has been made to pay the surface owner full payment for all damages sustained by reason of entering. If the owner will not settle, the state or its successor or a lease applicant goes to superior court to have the damages determined.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at RCW 79.11.210 on 2026-08-01, both paragraphs. Alaska has the same device and this record published Alaska as the only state with it, which was wrong and is now corrected: Washington's is the older of the two, tracing through 1927 c 255 to 1915, 1907, 1897 and 1895 session laws, where Alaska's dates from statehood. The two are not identical. Alaska's reservation names fissionable materials and geothermal resources, which had no meaning when Washington's was drafted, and Alaska lets the director set a bond after a hearing where the owner will not settle, where Washington sends the question to the superior court. The practical consequence for a reader is the same in both: land that was once state land probably has a severed mineral estate under it, and no private deed in the chain will show where it came from.

W. Va. Code § 37B-1-3

The Cotenancy Act defines a consenting cotenant as a tenant in common, joint tenant or parcener with an interest in the mineral property who consents in writing to a lawful use through a bona fide arms-length lease, and a nonconsenting cotenant as an owner who for any reason chooses not to consent to a use agreed by cotenants owning cumulatively at least an undivided three-fourths interest. It defines post-production expense broadly, to include severance taxes, pipelines, gathering, dehydration, transportation, fractionation, compression, processing, treating and marketing.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 37B-1-3. Recorded under severance because what it defines is the shape of a fragmented severed mineral estate and the vocabulary the rest of the Act operates on, not because it states what a severed estate is in West Virginia property law, which is NOT on this record. Two definitions do real work elsewhere on the page. The nonconsenting cotenant is defined to include an owner who declines "for any reason", which forecloses an argument about whether a refusal was reasonable. And the post-production expense definition is unusually long and expressly names severance taxes among the costs it covers, which matters because the royalty election in section 37B-1-4(b)(1) is free of those expenses. The Act also defines operator as an owner of at least an undivided three-fourths interest in the right to develop, and prorata share by net acreage over total net acreage in the unit.

Wis. Stat. s. 706.01, Definitions

Wisconsin defines the severed estate rather than describing it. An interest in minerals is any fee simple interest in minerals beneath the surface of land which is separate from the fee simple interest in the surface, and which was created by an instrument transferring, granting, assigning or reserving the minerals. Mineral is defined broadly for the purpose, as a naturally occurring substance recognised by standard authorities as mineral, whether metalliferous or not. A narrower term sits beside it for a different job: a conveyance of mineral interests means a transaction entered into to determine the presence, location, quality or quantity of metalliferous minerals, or to mine, develop or extract them, and any such transaction by a mining company is rebuttably presumed to be one.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Wis. Stat. s. 706.01(5), (7m), (8m) and (9) on 2026-08-01. Keeping the two terms apart is the whole of Wisconsin's scope question and the handoff had it open. The broad term drives the lapse statute, so the lapse reaches nonmetallic severed interests too. The narrow term drives the mandatory disclosure rule and the special indexing rule, so those reach metalliferous conveyances only. The rebuttable presumption in the narrow definition is doing real work: a transaction by a holder of a prospecting or mining permit is treated as a mineral conveyance unless somebody shows otherwise, which puts the burden on the party who would rather not disclose.

Wyo. Stat. § 34-27-103

Wyoming's Wind Energy Rights Act declares that wind energy rights are an interest in real property appurtenant to the surface estate, and that they shall not be severed from the surface estate, except that wind energy may be developed under a wind energy agreement. A wind energy agreement is itself an interest in real property and must be recorded in the office of the county clerk where the land is, with a description of the land. After such an agreement terminates the surface owner may require the developer to record a release within twenty days of a written request, and a developer who fails to do so is liable for all damages caused. Wind energy becomes personalty at the point of conversion into electricity. The Act then says that nothing in it shall be construed to change the common law as of April 1, 2011 as it relates to the rights belonging to, or the dominance of, the mineral estate.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 34-27-103 and 34-27-104 in the Title 34 PDF. This is on the record because of what it tells you about severance generally rather than because this site is about wind. Wyoming watched what a century of severed mineral estates did to its landowners and then, when a second severable resource appeared, legislated in 2011 to stop the same thing happening: the wind is appurtenant to the surface and may not be split off from it. In the next section it declines to disturb the mineral estate's dominance at all. A legislature can therefore be perfectly clear about the problem and still leave the existing split estates exactly where they are, which is the honest frame for every dormant mineral act on this site. WHAT IS NOT READ, and it is a real gap: Wyoming's general law on what a severed mineral estate is and what a grant or reservation of minerals reaches. Neither Title 30 nor Title 34 carried a general statement of it that this pass found, and section 34-27-104 preserves the common law rather than stating it.

Alabama Code § 9-17-24

Alabama's oil and gas chapter contains no surface damage act. A person proposing to drill a well in search of oil or gas must, before commencing drilling, notify the State Oil and Gas Supervisor on the prescribed form and pay a fee of three hundred dollars for each well, and drilling is prohibited until that notice is given and the fee paid. The form may be required to state the exact location of the well and the name and address of the owner, operator, contractor, driller and any other person responsible for the conduct of drilling operations. The surface owner is not among the people who must be notified, and the chapter's own definition of owner is the person who has the right to drill into and to produce from any pool and to appropriate the production. Nothing read in the chapter requires an operator to reach an agreement with the surface owner, to give the surface owner notice before entry, to post a bond running to the surface owner, or to pay for crop loss, lost improvements or permanent damage to the land.

Checked July 31, 2026. THE INSTRUMENT BEHIND THIS NEGATIVE. The whole of title 9 chapter 17, oil and gas, was fetched in one response through the Legislature's own API: 107 sections, 249,014 characters, read on 2026-07-31. The word "surface" appears 41 times in it and every one was read in context. None of them is a right of a surface owner. They are the surface acreage a unit is measured in, surface and subsurface rights acquired for a gas storage facility, surface mining to recover oil from oil sands, and land above pore space. The phrase "surface owner" does not appear in the chapter at all, and the phrase was checked as well as the word, because on this record California produced a false negative exactly that way: a search for "surface owner" in the California oil and gas chapter returned nothing while the state's duties sat under "surface property owner". Set the result against the states this record has already read: Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky and Utah all give a surface owner something by statute before or after entry, and Alabama gives none of them. What Alabama does protect is the ground over a COAL mine, which is the next rule, and that is a different statute in a different chapter with a different regulator. WHAT IS NOT READ: the Oil and Gas Board's own rules and regulations, which are published on its site and are not statute, and any Alabama decision on the implied right of a mineral owner to use the surface.

Alabama Code § 9-16-91

Underground coal mining operations conducted after July 1, 1998 must promptly repair or compensate for material damage to any occupied residential dwelling and related structures, or any noncommercial building, caused by surface subsidence. Repair includes rehabilitation, restoration or replacement, and compensation must be in the full amount of the diminution in value resulting from the subsidence damage; it may be accomplished by buying a non cancelable premium prepaid insurance policy before mining. The operator must also promptly replace any drinking, domestic or residential water supply from a well or spring that existed before the permit application and has been affected by contamination, diminution or interruption, and must promptly correct material subsidence damage to surface lands by restoring the land to a condition capable of maintaining the value and reasonably foreseeable uses it could support before. The statute then closes both ends. These remedies are the sole and exclusive remedies available to the owner for that damage and its effects, no punitive damages and no other compensatory damages are awarded for subsidence caused by longwall or other planned subsidence mining conducted in substantial compliance with a permit, and conduct in substantial compliance with the permit may not be deemed intentional, willful or wanton. But the remedies may not be diminished or waived by contrary provisions in deeds, leases or documents.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 9-16-91, in the surface mining chapter rather than the oil and gas chapter. This is the Alabama provision worth understanding properly, because it is a floor and a ceiling in the same subsection. The floor matters in a state where coal was severed from the surface a century ago on terms written by the mining company: an old deed that purports to waive all damage from subsidence cannot take away the right to have the house repaired or the water replaced. The ceiling matters just as much: where the mining is planned subsidence conducted in substantial compliance with a permit, these statutory remedies are all there is, punitive damages are gone, and the statute forecloses the argument that permitted conduct was willful. The exception it leaves open is a genuine subsidence damage AGREEMENT between the surface owner and the mineral owner or lessee, which the statute expressly permits and which the waiver bar does not reach. Compare West Virginia and Kentucky, the other coal states on this record, and note that the regulator is different again: this chapter is administered by the surface mining regulatory authority, not by the Oil and Gas Board named on this page. WHAT IS NOT READ: the permit provisions at sections 9-16-83 and 9-16-84 that decide when an operator may mine under a home at all, the regulatory authority's own rules, and any Alabama decision on subsection (f).

AS 38.05.130

Rights may not be exercised by the state, its lessees, successors or assigns under the reservation until they make provision to pay the owner of the land full payment for all damages sustained by the owner by reason of entering onto the land. If the owner for any cause refuses or neglects to settle the damages, the state, its lessees, successors or assigns, or an applicant for a lease or contract from the state for prospecting for valuable minerals, or an option, contract or lease for carbon storage or mining coal, or a lease for extracting geothermal resources, petroleum or natural gas, may enter onto the land in exercise of the reserved rights after posting a surety bond. The director determines the bond, after notice and an opportunity to be heard, to be sufficient as to form, amount and security to secure to the owner payment for damages. The entrant may then institute legal proceedings in a court where the land is located as may be necessary to determine the damages the owner may suffer.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 38.05.130. Set this beside Wyoming, which landed on this record the same day, because the two arrive at almost the same structure from opposite directions. Wyoming conditions entry on consent, an agreement, a waiver or a bond, and it is protecting a surface owner against a private mineral owner who bought the minerals from somebody a century ago. Alaska conditions the exercise of the state's OWN reserved rights on full payment for damages, or a bond if the owner will not settle. The bond is set by the director after notice and a hearing, which is a procedural protection Wyoming's section does not carry on its face, and the amount question that Wyoming leaves to a section this record did not read is answered here in the same sentence. What Alaska does not give the landowner is a veto, for the same reason Wyoming does not: refusing to settle produces a bond and an entry, not silence. WHAT IS NOT READ: how the court measures the damages once proceedings are instituted, and whether any Alaska decision construes "full payment for all damages sustained".

AS 38.05.255

Surface uses of land or water included within a mining property by the owners, lessees or operators are limited to those necessary for the prospecting for, extraction of, or basic processing of minerals, and are subject to reasonable concurrent uses. The director may issue leases for millsites, tailings disposal and other mine related facilities, conditioned on payment of a reasonable annual rent and restricted to uses the director approves. Timber from land open to mining without lease, except timberland, may be used by a mining claimant or prospecting site locator for the mining or development of the location or adjacent claims under common ownership, and on other land timber must be acquired as the chapter provides. Use of water must be made in accordance with the water statutes.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 38.05.255. Two phrases in the quoted sentence do work worth separating. "Limited to those necessary" is a reasonable-and-necessary standard of the kind Colorado states as a trespass rule and Texas leaves to the common law, but stated as a limit on the mineral side rather than as a remedy on the surface side. "Subject to reasonable concurrent uses" is an accommodation standard, and it points the same way as Colorado's and Kentucky's: the mineral operator does not get the ground to itself. What separates Alaska is what the standard attaches to, which is a mining property on land where the state holds the minerals, so the party being limited is very often the state's own lessee. WHAT IS NOT READ: the rest of the mining chapters in the mining title, and whether an equivalent limit is stated for oil and gas operations as distinct from mining.

A.R.S. s. 37-231(E), rights reserved in lands sold

The same section that reserves the minerals limits what can be done with them, and gives the person on top the first move. Mineral rights reserved to the state in land it has sold are closed to entry and location as a mining claim, so nobody can stake them. The state land department may instead issue mineral exploration permits over the reserved rights where it considers that in the best interest of the state, but the statute attaches a condition: the surface owner or owners have the first right of refusal to acquire those permits. Alongside that, the department must adopt rules protecting the patentee or contract purchaser and their successors against damage to the lands, livestock, water, crops or other tangible improvements suffered because the department's own mining, oil, gas and geothermal lessees or permittees used or occupied the land, and it may at any time require any of them to post a bond in a reasonable principal amount conditioned on paying for that damage.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at A.R.S. s. 37-231(E)(1) and (E)(2) on 2026-08-01. Hawaii is the other state on this record whose statute gives a surface owner first refusal over their own reserved minerals, and the two differ in what they attach to: Arizona's is a right of first refusal on the permit to EXPLORE, Hawaii's is on the geothermal mining LEASE itself, which is the instrument that authorises production. Either way it is a different kind of protection from the ones that are more common here: it does not compensate the owner for an intrusion or condition it, it offers them the chance to be the one holding the permit. What the subsection does not say is on what terms, or what happens if they decline, or how they are to be told an application has been made. The damage protection in (E)(1) is a duty to make RULES rather than a right stated in the statute, and those rules were not read, so what is actually protected and how a claim is made is not established here. Note the categories the statute itself names, because they are agricultural: lands, livestock, water, crops, or other tangible improvements.

A.R.S. s. 27-560, Surface use by lessee; liability for damages; bond; appraisal of damages; appeal

On an oil and gas lease of state land the lessee has the right to use as much of the surface as is reasonably necessary for its operations, and is liable for the damage it causes to the state's interest in the surface or to the interest of the surface lessee. The department may require the lessee at any time to execute a bond in a reasonable principal amount conditioned on payment for all such damage. Where the lessee and the surface lessee cannot agree what the damage is worth, the department or its agent appraises it, and the appraisal can be appealed.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at A.R.S. s. 27-560 on 2026-08-01, the whole section, which is short. Be clear about who this protects, because it is easy to read as a general split estate rule and it is not one: the land is state land, and the people who can be paid are the state and the state's surface LESSEE. A private surface owner over privately owned minerals is not within this section, and nothing was read that gives them an equivalent. Appeals from the appraisal go under s. 37-214, which was not read.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-72-214(b), with § 15-72-219

Arkansas does not give a surface owner the pre-drilling notice and negotiation rights that North Dakota, New Mexico or Tennessee give. What it gives is a remedy after a spill, and it is a reasonably strong one. Ark. Code 15-72-219(a) entitles a surface owner or surface tenant to reasonable compensation where a spill of crude oil or produced water has damaged real property, growing crops, trees, shrubs, fences, roads, structures, improvements, livestock or personal property, or has caused measurable damage to the productive capacity of the soil. Subsection (b) adds restoration on top of compensation: the operator SHALL restore the damaged land in accordance with the rules of the Division of Environmental Quality or of the Oil and Gas Commission, and subsection (c) requires those rules to provide as nearly as practicable for remediation to the condition of the property before the spill and to specify a reasonable time frame for starting and finishing. If the responsible party does not restore, subsection (d) lets the surface owner or tenant sue for an order requiring restoration to the agency's standards on the balance of probabilities, and the court may allow a reasonable attorney's fee together with costs. The section is prospective, applying to spills after 17 September 2007, does not limit causes of action for damage the agency rules do not address, and does not cut down more stringent restoration terms in a lease. Now the trap, which is in a different section and has a clock on it. Ark. Code 15-72-214(b) provides that a surface owner seeking to recover under the operator's proof of financial responsibility for damages caused by the operator's neglect must file written notice of claim with the Commission WITHIN ONE YEAR OF THE DATE THE DRILLING PERMIT ISSUED, not within a year of the damage, and that the claim ranks behind the Commission's own rights under the same security.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-72-214 and 15-72-219 on the verbatim mirror. The quote chosen is the one-year limit rather than the compensation right, because the compensation right is what a reader will expect and the limit is what will surprise them: it runs from the permit rather than from the damage, so a spill in a well's third year has no claim against that security at all.

Cal. Pub. Res. Code § 3106

It is declared a policy of the state that the grant in an oil and gas lease or contract to a lessee or operator of the right or power, in substance, to explore for and remove all hydrocarbons from any lands in the state is, in the absence of an express provision to the contrary in the lease or contract, deemed to allow the lessee or contractor and their successors or assigns to do what a prudent operator using reasonable diligence would do, having in mind the best interests of the lessor, the lessee and the state in producing and removing hydrocarbons. That is expressly declared to include the injection of air, gas, water or other fluids into the productive strata, the application of pressure, heat or other means to reduce the viscosity of the hydrocarbons, the supplying of additional motive force, and the creating of enlarged or new channels for underground movement of hydrocarbons into production wells, in each case where the method has been approved by the supervisor. Nothing in the section imposes a legal duty on the lessee or contractor to conduct any of those operations. The supervisor is separately directed to supervise drilling, operation, maintenance and abandonment so as to prevent, as far as possible, damage to life, health, property and natural resources.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at Public Resources Code section 3106, subsections (a) and (b). This record now holds three statutory rules of construction for mineral instruments and they do not point the same way, which is the reason to publish this one. Kentucky's constitution reads an old coal severance DOWN, presuming the parties meant only the extraction methods commonly in use in the area at the time. Virginia's code settles what a coal conveyance does not reach at all. California reads an oil and gas lease UP: silence in the instrument becomes permission to do what a prudent operator would do, and the statute then lists enhanced recovery techniques the parties may never have contemplated. Three limits are in the text and each matters. It applies to a lease or contract rather than to a severance deed. It yields to an express provision to the contrary, so the drafting cure is available. And the listed methods require the supervisor's approval. Note also what the section refuses to do: it creates no duty to develop, which is the opposite of what Kansas legislated. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether a California court has applied subsection (b), and what "best interests of the lessor" has been held to require.

Cal. Pub. Res. Code § 3284

California defines a surface property owner as the owner of real property shown on the latest equalized assessment roll, or the owner of record according to the county assessor or tax collector where more recent information exists. Two duties are then keyed to distance rather than to ownership of the mineral estate. In a health protection zone, meaning the area within 3,200 feet of a sensitive receptor such as a residence, a school, a park, a hospital, a prison or any building housing a business open to the public, an operator must before commencing work requiring a notice of intention contact property owners AND TENANTS within a 3,200 foot radius of the wellhead in writing with a record of delivery, at least thirty days beforehand, and offer to sample and test water wells or surface water on their property before and after drilling. If sampling is requested in time, drilling may not commence until a baseline sample has been collected, and the operator bears the cost. Separately, for a well stimulation treatment, it is the policy of the state that a copy of the approved permit and information on the available water sampling and testing be provided to every tenant of the surface property and every surface property owner whose property line is within a 1,500 foot radius of the wellhead or within 500 feet of the horizontal projection of the well, the notification is performed by an independent entity the operator contracts and the division may audit, and the treatment may not commence before thirty calendar days after the copies are provided.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at Public Resources Code sections 3156, 3160 and 3280 to 3284. THIS RULE CORRECTS A DRAFT OF THIS PAGE THAT WAS WRONG, and the mistake is worth recording because it is the mistake this site is built to avoid. The chapter was searched for the phrase 'surface owner', which appears in it zero times, and the first draft concluded that California gives a surface owner nothing. California says 'surface PROPERTY owner', and once that is read there is a good deal here. The correction changes the finding rather than only the wording. What California actually does is unlike the surface damage states on this record. Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, West Virginia, Kentucky and Wyoming all attach the operator duty to the person who owns the surface, because the premise is a split estate and the question is what one estate owes the other. California attaches it to PROXIMITY, and extends it to tenants, who own nothing at all. A renter a thousand feet from the wellhead is owed the notice and may request the water testing; a surface owner two miles away is owed neither. The subject of the protection is a person near a well, not an estate in land. Note also what is absent: nothing read in the chapter gives a California surface owner compensation for surface damage. Every use of 'damages' and of 'compensation' in the chapter was read, and they concern blowout insurance, eminent domain security, civil penalties and liability for violations, not a landowner damages regime. WHAT IS NOT READ: the notice of intention section itself, the local ordinances that in California often decide these questions, and any decision applying the health protection zone article, which took effect in June 2024 after a referendum petition against it was withdrawn.

C.R.S. § 34-60-127(1)(a)

Colorado's accommodation statute requires an operator to conduct oil and gas operations in a way that minimizes intrusion on and damage to the surface, using alternatives that are technologically sound, economically practicable and reasonably available.

Checked July 25, 2026. Full text read at colorado.public.law and corroborated at codes.findlaw.com, which states it is current as of January 1, 2025. The section also gives the surface owner a cause of action for a failure to meet the standard, and once the surface owner shows material interference the operator bears the burden of proving it met the standard. It contains no good-faith-negotiation requirement, no notice requirement and no bond provision; those are elsewhere.

Gerrity Oil & Gas Corp. v. Magness, No. 96SC215 (Colo. Sept. 15, 1997) (en banc)

Colorado's Supreme Court acknowledges the old label of a dominant mineral estate and then qualifies it: in a practical sense each estate is burdened by the rights of the other, so a flat statement that the mineral estate is dominant in Colorado overstates the law.

Checked July 25, 2026. Full opinion read at caselaw.findlaw.com. The opinion first notes that "we have referred to the mineral estate as the dominant estate and the surface estate as the servient estate" and immediately gives the qualification quoted above, which is the controlling gloss. The Pacific Reporter citation reported elsewhere as 946 P.2d 913 was seen only in search-result titles and is deliberately omitted here.

Gerrity Oil & Gas Corp. v. Magness, No. 96SC215 (Colo. Sept. 15, 1997) (en banc)

An operator's conduct on the surface is a trespass unless it is reasonable and necessary to develop the mineral interest, and the surface owner's initial burden is to show the conduct materially interfered with surface uses.

Checked July 25, 2026. Read in the same fetched opinion. The court also states that "the surface owner's initial burden is to present evidence that the operator's conduct materially interfered with surface uses", and that due regard "requires mineral rights holders to accommodate surface owners to the fullest extent possible consistent with their right to develop the mineral estate". A related point about expert testimony on the standard of care was only partially confirmed and is not quoted.

Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission, 700 Series rules

When a surface owner is not party to a lease or surface use agreement, the operator must post financial assurance with the commission before bringing heavy equipment onto that owner's land: $4,000 per well on non-irrigated land, $10,000 per well on irrigated land, or a $100,000 statewide blanket.

Checked July 25, 2026. Read in the commission's own 700 Series rules PDF, marked as of April 30, 2022. The bond is released when a surface use agreement is entered. A surface owner claims against it through a hearing and bears the burden of proving unreasonable crop or land damage, and the award is not capped at the bond amount.

C.G.S. § 8-1aa, Ridgeline protection: Definitions

Connecticut has no mining statute. What it has instead is a zoning mandate keyed to specific geology. In any municipality where a traprock ridge or an amphibolite ridge is located, the zoning regulations shall provide for development restrictions in ridgeline setback areas and shall restrict quarrying and clear cutting, except that three things are permitted in a ridgeline setback area as of right: emergency work necessary to protect life and property; any nonconforming uses that were in existence and approved on or before the effective date of the regulations; and selective timbering, grazing of domesticated animals and passive recreation. The statute then names the ridges. Forty-four traprock ridges, being Beacon Hill, Saltonstall Mountain, Totoket Mountain, Pistapaug Mountain, Fowler Mountain, Beseck Mountain, Higby Mountain, Chauncey Peak, Lamentation Mountain, Cathole Mountain, South Mountain, East Peak, West Peak, Short Mountain, Ragged Mountain, Bradley Mountain, Pinnacle Rock, Rattlesnake Mountain, Talcott Mountain, Hatchett Hill, Peak Mountain, West Suffield Mountain, Cedar Mountain, East Rock, Mount Sanford, Prospect Ridge, Peck Mountain, West Rock, Sleeping Giant, Pond Ledge Hill, Onion Mountain, The Sugarloaf, The Hedgehog, West Mountains, The Knolls, Barndoor Hills, Stony Hill, Manitook Mountain, Rattlesnake Hill, Durkee Hill, East Hill, Rag Land, Bear Hill and the Orenaug Hills. And five amphibolite ridges, being Huckleberry Hill, East Hill, Ratlum Hill, Mount Hoar and Sweetheart Mountain. A ridgeline is the line created by all points at the top of a fifty per cent slope which is maintained for a distance of fifty horizontal feet perpendicular to the slope and which consists of surficial basalt geology identified on a named United States Geological Survey map. The setback area is bounded by a line parallel to the ridgeline one hundred and fifty feet away on the more wooded side, and by the contour line where a slope of less than fifty per cent is maintained for fifty feet or more on the rockier side.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at C.G.S. §§ 8-2(b)(10) and 8-1aa on 2026-08-03, the ridgeline definitions added by P.A. 95-239 and the amphibolite limb by P.A. 98-105. THIS IS THE MOST GEOLOGICALLY SPECIFIC PROVISION ON THIS RECORD BY A LONG WAY, and it is worth being precise about what makes it unusual. Other states here regulate extraction by defining a substance: New Hampshire defines earth by what normally masks the bedrock, Vermont defines a slate quarry and dimensional stone, Massachusetts defines mining as the extraction of coal. Connecticut regulates a PLACE, and it identifies the place three times over, by naming forty-nine mountains, by a geometric test of slope and distance, and by reference to a named USGS surficial materials map. The reason is not hidden: the traprock ridges are the Metacomet ridge basalt, and crushed traprock is what Connecticut quarries. WHAT THE PROVISION DOES AND DOES NOT DO. It binds municipalities rather than quarry operators: the duty is to adopt regulations, and what those regulations say is a municipal question this record did not read. It reaches the setback area rather than the whole ridge. And the nonconforming use exception preserves quarrying that was in existence and approved before the regulations took effect, which in a state where the working quarries are old is likely to be most of it. WHAT IS NOT READ, AND NO NEGATIVE ABOUT SURFACE OWNER PROTECTION IS PUBLISHED FOR CONNECTICUT: any municipal zoning regulation; the rest of title 8; the inland wetlands and watercourses chapter at 22a-36 and following, which is where a Connecticut excavation would meet an environmental permit; and the enforcement provisions beyond § 8-12, which lets a zoning enforcement officer issue an immediately effective cease and desist order where the violation involves grading of land or THE REMOVAL OF EARTH.

7 Del. C. § 6105, Filing of records of drilling; confidential nature of records

On application, the Secretary may permit geological, geophysical and seismic surveys of the tide and submerged lands of the State, including the taking of cores and other samples. Such permits are nonexclusive and give no preferential right to any lease. After consulting the state agencies with an interest in the possible effects of leasing, the Secretary includes such rules as are needed to protect the fish, game, wildlife and natural resources. An application must describe the areas, name and address the applicant, and give any other relevant information the Secretary requires. A permit lasts not more than two years and may be renewed for like periods on showing due compliance. The permittee must give the Department complete information about the area or areas of proposed operations, the type of exploration and a schedule of the periods during which explorations will be conducted, and that information shall be treated as confidential unless released by the permittee. Records of drilling stay with the permittee and are made available to the Secretary and the State Geologist on request, and are then for their confidential use and not open to inspection by any other person or agency without the permittee's written consent. The Secretary may require, as a condition of a lease, that the lessee make available all factual and physical exploration results, logs and records from operations under the lease, on the same confidential terms. And disclosure is an offence: the Secretary, or anybody doing work assigned by the Secretary, may not disclose that information to anybody outside that circle or use it for any purpose other than administering the chapter without written consent, on pain of a fine of not less than twenty-five dollars nor more than a hundred, or imprisonment for not more than thirty days, or both.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at 7 Del. C. §§ 6103, 6104, 6105 and 6106 on 2026-08-03. THIS IS THE EXACT INVERSE OF MASSACHUSETTS AND THE TWO WERE READ ON THE SAME DAY, which is the only reason the comparison is available. MGL c. 21B § 4 provides that one hundred and eighty days after the conclusion of exploration the results of such exploration shall be made public by the licensee. Delaware provides that the same class of information is confidential unless the permittee releases it, is closed to any other person or agency without written consent, and may not be disclosed by the officials who hold it without committing a criminal offence. Same subject, opposite defaults: Massachusetts treats an explorer's findings about the ground as public knowledge after a delay, Delaware treats them as the explorer's property indefinitely. Neither state has an extractive industry of the kind the provision imagines, which makes the choice a pure statement of policy rather than a bargain struck with an industry. NOTE WHAT THE PENALTY IS ATTACHED TO. Section 6106 punishes the STATE, not the operator: it is the Secretary and the Secretary's staff who face the fine and the thirty days. This record has not found another provision anywhere that criminalises a regulator's disclosure of exploration data. WHAT IS NOT READ, AND NO NEGATIVE ABOUT SURFACE OWNER PROTECTION IS PUBLISHED FOR DELAWARE: nothing was read about what a Delaware landowner may object to, what notice they get, or what damages they can claim, because the chapter is drafted around state-owned water bottoms where there is no private surface owner to protect. Whether anything else in Delaware law regulates digging on dry land was not established, and the silence here is a silence about what was read.

Fla. Stat. s. 270.11(3), prohibition on exercise of right of entry in certain cases

Florida keeps the mineral fractions it reserved but gives up the ability to use them on small land. The right of entry to any reserved interest in phosphate, minerals and metals, or in petroleum, held by the Board of Trustees, the State Board of Education, a local government, a water management district or another state agency, is released for any parcel of property that is, or ever has been, a contiguous tract of less than twenty acres in the aggregate under the same ownership. So an ordinary Florida house lot carries a severed state mineral interest that nobody can exercise against it.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Fla. Stat. s. 270.11(3) on 2026-08-01. The phrase doing the work is IS, OR EVER HAS BEEN. The release attaches to the parcel's history and not only to its present size, so land that was once a small contiguous tract under one ownership keeps the release even after somebody assembles a larger holding around it. What the subsection releases is the right of ENTRY, not the reserved interest itself, so the state's fraction of the minerals stays where it is and continues to appear in the title. Nothing was read about how a title examiner is expected to establish that a parcel ever was under twenty acres, which is a documentary question the statute does not address.

O.C.G.A. § 12-4-46(c)(2)

Before any well other than a fresh water well may be drilled in Georgia the operator must apply to the director of the Environmental Protection Division for a drilling permit and pay a fee of 500 dollars. What follows is a notice regime more specific than most states put in a statute rather than a rule. Within thirty days of receiving a properly completed application the director must issue public notice by posting it to the division website and mailing or emailing it to anybody who has asked to be told about permit applications, and must then allow a thirty day public comment period and actually review and consider the comments received. Separately, and this is the part that reaches landowners, the APPLICANT must deliver that public notice directly within ten days, and the statute sets a floor of three things it must do: post the notice along the road nearest the proposed well; give it to every person owning real property within half a mile of the proposed wellhead AND within half a mile along the route of any directional borehole, and to any residence with a drinking water well inside the same two half mile envelopes; and publish it in at least one legal organ in the county. The directional borehole limb matters, because it means the notice envelope follows the wellbore sideways under land the operator has no surface presence on at all.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from the verbatim mirror, the whole of O.C.G.A. 12-4-46. The 500 dollar figure and the thirty day periods are on the face of subsections (a) and (b), and the three notice obligations are the numbered paragraphs of subsection (c), which the statute introduces with the words at a minimum.

O.C.G.A. § 12-4-75read from FindLaw Codes, Georgia Code 12-4-75, current as of March 28, 2024

Georgia runs two entirely separate regimes inside the same chapter, and which one applies decides what a landowner can expect. Oil and gas go through the Oil and Gas and Deep Drilling Act at O.C.G.A. 12-4-40 and following. Everything else that is dug rather than drilled goes through the Georgia Surface Mining Act at 12-4-70 and following, which is the regime that actually governs the kaolin belt, the granite and marble quarries and the aggregate pits that are the bulk of Georgia extraction. Under 12-4-75 an operator of a surface mining firm is required to obtain a permit from the division before mining, to submit and obtain approval of a mining land use plan, and to post a bond conditioned on compliance, with reclamation obligations attaching to the affected land as defined in 12-4-72. The Environmental Protection Division publishes the list of permitted surface mining facilities, so who holds a Georgia mining permit is a matter of public record and was revised as recently as April 2026. This split is also why the severance tax at 12-4-54 looks so narrow: it is written into the oil and gas part and reaches oil and gas only, leaving the minerals Georgia is actually known for outside it.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from the verbatim mirror. The whole of the Surface Mining Act part was pulled, 12-4-70 through 12-4-84, and 12-4-75 is the section imposing the operator's duties. The regulator side was confirmed the same day against the Environmental Protection Division's own page on a georgia.gov host, which states in its own words that the Surface Mining Unit reviews applications and approves surface mining land use plans, issues surface mining permits, conducts compliance evaluations, reviews and approves bonding requirements and ensures reclamation of completed mining operations.

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.

Idaho Code s. 47-334, Use of surface land by owner or operator

An owner or operator may enter surface land under which it holds oil and gas rights and use the surface to the extent reasonably necessary to conduct operations, and consistent with allowing the surface landowner the greatest possible use of their property to the extent that use does not interfere with operations. Except as reasonably necessary the operator must mitigate the effects of access, minimise interference, and compensate the landowner for unreasonable loss of crops, unreasonable loss of value to existing improvements, and unreasonable permanent damage to the land. The operator is not required to obtain location or spacing exceptions, or to use directional or horizontal drilling that is not technologically feasible, economically practicable or reasonably available. Either side may request non binding mediation on the amount of damages, the mediator is mutually selected, the cost is shared equally, and mediation does not delay operations. A surface use bond of at least six thousand dollars per well site must be furnished to the department before the drilling permit is approved, payable to the department for the landowner's benefit, and released only on a surface use agreement, final judicial resolution with damages paid, or plugging and abandonment.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Idaho Code 47-334 on 2026-08-03, added 2017 ch. 271 s. 27 and amended 2023 ch. 283 s. 14. Two limits matter more than the protections and belong in the same breath as them. THE CONTRACT WINS: subsection (6)(b) provides that a lease, surface use agreement or other written contract shall control both the use of the surface and the compensation for damage, and subsection (5) disapplies the reasonable use standard where it conflicts with a contractual provision. So this is a default regime for a landowner who has signed nothing, and it is worth knowing before signing. THE BOND ALSO GOES: subsection (8)(a) disapplies the surface use bond entirely where the landowner is a party or successor to a lease of the underlying oil and gas, to a surface use agreement, or to any contract, waiver or release about the operator's use of the surface. And the definition excludes tenants in terms: surface landowner does not include the landowner's lessee, renter, tenant or other contractually related person, which is the opposite of California, where operator duties are keyed to how close people are to the well rather than to who holds title and do reach tenants. The word UNREASONABLE qualifies all three heads of compensation, so ordinary damage from operations conducted reasonably is not compensable under this section. WHAT IS NOT READ: any Idaho decision on what greatest possible use requires, and the department's rules on the bond form.

Idaho Code s. 47-901, Right of way for mining purposes

The owner, locator or occupant of a mining claim, whether patented under the laws of the United States or held by location or possession, may have and acquire a right of way for ingress and egress, when necessary in working the claim, over and across the lands or mining claims of others, whether patented or otherwise. A companion section extends it to railroads, ditches and tunnels. If the right of way cannot be acquired by agreement with the owner or claimant of the land, the miner commences an action in the district court for the county where the right of way or part of it is situated, by verified complaint describing the character and extent of the right sought, their own mine or claim, and the land to be affected, with the name of its occupant or owner, and may plead any tender of compensation made. Commissioners are appointed, or the court tries it if they are not; they take an oath, view the land, and report, and the report may be set aside. On payment or tender of the sum assessed as damages the miner is entitled to the right of way prayed for and may immediately occupy it, erect works and structures on it, and make excavations in it. There is an appeal from the commissioners' award on bond.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Idaho Code 47-901, 47-903 and 47-908 on 2026-08-03, with the procedure at 47-902 to 47-909. The chapter is territorial law of 1876 and it is still in the code. This is PRIVATE CONDEMNATION: an ordinary claimant, not a public body and not a utility, files in district court and takes a right of way over a neighbour's land on payment of assessed damages. Hawaii is the nearest thing on this record and it is a different device, because HRS 182-12 has the STATE acquiring rights of way for mining transportation by eminent domain and then assigning, leasing or transferring them to the person mining. Idaho puts the action in the private claimant's own hands. Be exact about the scope: every operative word is MINING CLAIM, so this is the mining claim world rather than severed oil and gas, and nothing read extends it. Also worth noticing on the other side of the ledger, because it explains what the chapter is for: Idaho has no statute read here giving a surface owner a right to refuse. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether the chapter is used, any Idaho decision on it, and how commissioners value a right of way.

225 ILCS 725/19.6

The Illinois Oil and Gas Act assesses an annual well fee on each permittee, one hundred dollars a well for the first hundred wells and seventy-five for each beyond that, and splits the proceeds between the Underground Resources Conservation Enforcement Fund and the Plugging and Restoration Fund. The Department administers an Oil and Gas Well Site Plugging and Restoration Program, the Plugging and Restoration Fund and a Landowner Grant Program, and may spend appropriated amounts from the fund on plugging, replugging or repairing any well and restoring the site, including removing well site equipment and production facilities, and on reimbursing landowners for plugging a well and restoring the site where the landowner has no legal obligation to do it. Where a well is an orphan the State has a lien for the fees due and the funds spent, on the whole interest of the owners and the operator and on the equipment, prior and superior to any mortgage or other lien except local property taxes.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read in the Illinois Oil and Gas Act at sections 19.6 and 19.7. THE NEGATIVE BEHIND THIS RULE WAS ESTABLISHED BY SEARCHING THE FULL TEXT OF THE ACT AND HERE IS THE INSTRUMENT. All 125,000 characters of the Act were fetched in one request and searched. The phrase "surface owner" appears NOT ONCE. Controls confirm the search works on the same text: "operator" appears twenty-five times, "lease" forty-four, "plugging" sixty-two, "royalty" nine, "landowner" eight. Every one of the eight landowner mentions is about the fund and the grant programme. So Illinois has no surface damage act, no statutory notice to a surface owner before drilling, no accommodation provision and no surface use agreement requirement anywhere in its oil and gas act, and what it has instead is the state reimbursing a landowner for cleaning up somebody else's abandoned well. That is a different theory from every other state here: not a duty the operator owes you, but a fund that pays you when the operator has gone. What the instrument cannot exclude is a duty in another act, in the Department's rules, or at common law. WHAT IS NOT READ: the Hydraulic Fracturing Regulatory Act at 225 ILCS 732, which is the obvious place a modern notice or setback requirement would sit and which was not read at all.

Ind. Code § 14-34-4-7(a)(5)

The Indiana director may not approve a surface coal mining permit unless the applicant affirmatively demonstrates a list of things, one of which applies where the private mineral estate has been severed from the private surface estate. In that case the applicant must submit either the written consent of the surface owner to extraction of coal by surface mining methods, or a conveyance expressly granting or reserving the right to extract coal by those methods. Where the conveyance does not expressly grant that right, the statute sends the surface-subsurface relationship back to Indiana law to be determined.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at IC 14-34-4-7(a)(5), inside the section governing approval of a surface coal mining permit application, where the applicant carries the burden of establishing compliance. The conflict it addresses is one every coal state has had to resolve somehow: an old severance deed written before anyone contemplated removing the surface to reach the seam, and an operator who now proposes to do exactly that. Indiana resolves it through the permit rather than through the deed. It refuses the permit unless the applicant produces either the surface owner's written consent or a conveyance expressly granting the surface mining right, and where the conveyance is silent it does not decide the question but remits it to Indiana law. The effect is to place the burden on the party who wants to mine without settling the underlying property question at all. Two limits: this is about COAL extracted by surface mining methods and this record has read nothing applying it to oil and gas, and it operates as a condition of a permit rather than as a rule of property. What Indiana law says when the conveyance is silent has NOT been read.

Iowa Code s. 458A.23, Action to obtain release, damages, costs, and attorney fees

Iowa's protection for the person who owns the land is aimed at the paperwork rather than at the drilling, and it has teeth. When a recorded oil, gas or metallic mineral lease on Iowa land becomes forfeited because the lessee has not complied with it or with Iowa law, the lessee has sixty days from the forfeiture to surrender the lease in writing, duly acknowledged, and place it on record in the county. If the lessee does not, the owner of the land may execute an affidavit of noncompliance, in a form the statute prints out in full. And if the lessee still neglects or refuses to release, or maintains the lease is in force, the landowner may sue for the release and recover a fixed sum in damages, all costs, a reasonable attorney fee for preparing and prosecuting the suit, and any additional damages the evidence warrants, with attachment available as in other cases.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Iowa Code ss. 458A.22 and 458A.23 on 2026-08-01. The fixed damages figure is one hundred dollars and it has not been changed since the provision's predecessor in the 1939 Code, so treat it as nominal; the parts with real value are the costs, the attorney fee and the additional damages the evidence warrants. What makes this worth publishing is not the money but the self-help: the statute prints the affidavit of noncompliance as a form, so a landowner can clear an expired lease from their title without a lawyer as a first step. This is a different kind of protection from a surface damage statute, and Iowa was not found to have one of those. No general split-estate surface damage or accommodation provision was read for Iowa, and none is claimed.

K.S.A. § 55-151

Before drilling any well an operator must file an application of intent to drill with the Kansas Corporation Commission, including the name and address of the surface owner, and including non-binding preliminary estimates of the location of roads of ingress or egress, any tank battery, and any pipeline or electrical line. On receiving the application the commission must send a copy of it to the named surface owner, together with contact information for a designated representative of the applicant including name, address, telephone number and fax or email address. The commission need not send it if the operator verifies that the application has been delivered to the surface owner. No drilling may commence until the commission's authorised agents approve the application, and in approving it the agent must determine that the proposed construction will protect all usable waters and must set the pipe needed to do so and the plugging requirements on abandonment. The Kansas surface owner notice act defines a surface owner as the person holding legal title to the surface as shown on the register of deeds' records who is assessed real estate property taxes, and excludes a tenant and anyone whose only right to use the surface rests on an easement, right of way, licence, mortgage lien, severed mineral interest or other non-possessory interest.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 55-151 and 55-169a, the second being part of the Kansas surface owner notice act of 2009. The design is what distinguishes it. In Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, Kentucky and Virginia the operator owes the surface owner the notice; in Kansas the operator owes the information to the regulator and the REGULATOR delivers it, unless the operator proves it delivered the application itself. That removes the failure mode where a notice never arrives and the owner has to prove it. Note two things the section is candid about. The location estimates are described in the statute itself as non-binding and preliminary, so what arrives is an indication rather than a commitment. And what the statute gives the surface owner is information: nothing read here gives them a right to object, a right to be paid for surface damage, or an accommodation standard. WHAT IS NOT READ: sections 55-155 and 55-173, which the notice act's definitions also serve and which govern notice before plugging and abandonment, and whether Kansas has any surface damage provision elsewhere.

Ky. Rev. Stat. § 353.595

Before drilling a new oil or gas well the operator must give the surface owner written notice, by certified mail postmarked at least ten days before drilling begins or by personal delivery at least eight days before. The notice must identify the proposed point of entry and the date drilling starts, enclose a photocopy of the drilling application, and offer to meet. If the surface owner asks in time, the operator must meet in the county to discuss roads, points of entry, pits, restoration of fences cut for entry, use of water, removal of trees and drainage changes. The surface owner is entitled to reasonable compensation for damage to growing crops, trees, shrubs, fences, roads, structures, improvements and livestock caused by the drilling and by later production operations, and for negligent acts causing measurable damage to the productive capacity of the soil, and the operator may not use more of the surface than is reasonably necessary. Payment is due no later than ninety days after completion of the well; if the operator does not tender in time or the tender is not reasonable, the surface owner recovers attorney's fees as well, unless the operator relied on a third-party appraiser's assessment of damages. On plugging or reworking, the operator must restore the surface as near as practicable to its prior condition.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read as the per-section PDF the Kentucky General Assembly publishes for KRS 353.595, extracted with pdftotext -layout. Read the section's own gate first, because it decides whether any of this reaches a given reader: it applies only to new wells spudded after July 13, 1990, not to reworking, and only where the surface owner has not consented in writing AND either the oil and gas has been completely severed from the surface or the surface owner owns an interest in the oil and gas. A surface owner who signed the lease is outside it. Note also who the section counts as the surface owner, because it is the second definition of its kind on this record and it goes further than New Mexico's: the surface owner is the person in whose name the surface is assessed for tax according to the records of the county property valuation administrator, the operator must obtain that officer's certification within ninety days before giving notice, and the section says the certification shall be conclusive evidence of the surface ownership, with notice to that person conclusive notice to the record owners of all interests in the surface. Two further provisions are worth separating from the rest. The reasonable-necessity limit in subsection (5) is a statutory statement of the same idea Texas reaches through the accommodation doctrine and Colorado through its surface-use statute, and it sits in the middle of a compensation provision rather than in a separate section. And the fee shifting in subsection (6) is qualified in a way this record has not seen elsewhere: the surface owner who has to sue for compensation gets attorney's fees where the operator missed the ninety days or tendered unreasonably, but not where the operator relied on a third-party appraiser's assessment of the damages. Note also the trade in subsection (8): compensation paid and accepted under this section is a complete bar to any other remedy for those damages, and the section is otherwise not to be construed as diminishing either party's common law rights. WHAT IS NOT READ: how Kentucky courts have measured reasonable compensation under this section, and what the property valuation administrator's certification costs or how long it takes.

Ky. Rev. Stat. § 353.5901

A well operator must file an operations and reclamation plan with its application for a permit to drill, deepen or reopen a well, describing the best management practices to be used, every area to be disturbed including roads, gathering lines, the well site and tanks, with a plat, and covering site plans, construction, reclamation, maintenance and closure. Where there has been a complete severance of the oil and gas from the surface and the surface owners of all disturbed areas have not signed agreements to the plan, the operator must send each of them the plan and plat by certified mail with a notice, in words the statute prescribes, telling them mediation may be requested and that they may take part. If agreement has not been reached, the permit shall not be issued until the dispute has been referred to mediation by the Energy and Environment Cabinet's Office of Administrative Hearings and mediation has concluded, either by agreement or by the mediator's report. Each participant pays a hundred dollar fee, which the department may waive for a surface owner who proves inability to pay. Mediation is held at the site within fifteen days of the request where practicable. If no agreement follows, the mediator weighs the location of roads, gathering lines and tank batteries, the timing against the surface owner's seasonal uses and the operator's need to drill, the impact on timber, houses, barns, ponds, crops and other improvements, and whether reclamation is provided for, then recommends that the director accept the operator's plan or accept it with modifications. The director decides within five days.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read as the per-section PDF the Kentucky General Assembly publishes for KRS 353.5901, effective July 14, 2018. This is the strongest thing in Kentucky oil and gas law for a surface owner over a severed estate and it should not be read as more than it is. The surface owner does not get a veto: the mediator may recommend the plan exactly as the operator submitted it and the director may accept it, and subsection (8) lets the director approve a plan containing elements of both. What the surface owner gets is that the permit cannot issue while the disagreement is unaddressed, which puts the operator's timetable rather than the surface owner's patience on the line. Three limits are in the text. The mediation gate applies only where there has been a COMPLETE severance of the oil and gas from the surface to be disturbed; where there has not, subsection (3) simply has the department review and approve the plan before the permit issues. It is the well operator who may request mediation, so the operator controls when it starts, though it cannot get the permit until it does. And the hundred dollar fee is charged to each party who participates, waivable only on verifiable proof of financial inability to pay. WHAT IS NOT READ: how often mediation changes a plan, and the administrative regulations the section leaves the department to promulgate.

Ky. Rev. Stat. § 353.597

A well operator must replace the water supply of any owner of an interest in real property who takes all or part of their water for domestic, agricultural, industrial or other legitimate use from an underground or surface source, where the supply has been substantially disrupted by contamination, diminution or interruption proximately resulting from the operator's oil or gas operation.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read as the per-section PDF the Kentucky General Assembly publishes for KRS 353.597, effective July 15, 1994. The whole section is the one sentence quoted, and two things in it are wider than the surface damage section above. It runs to any owner of an interest in real property rather than to the surface owner of the drilled tract, so a neighbour whose well is affected is within it. And it is not confined to new wells or to severed estates, which is the gate that limits KRS 353.595. The duty is to replace the supply rather than to pay for it. WHAT IS NOT READ, and it matters: the section attaches no presumption of causation within any distance of a well, sets no time limit, provides no bond or interim supply, and does not say who decides whether a disruption was substantial or proximately caused. That absence is worth measuring against the state on this record that legislated every one of those things. North Carolina presumes the operator responsible for contamination of all water supplies within a half mile radius of the wellhead, rebuttable only on four listed grounds, requires pre-drilling and follow-up testing at the operator's cost by a laboratory the surface owner chooses, and requires a replacement supply adequate in quality and quantity. Compare also West Virginia, where damage to a water supply in use before the permitted activity is one of five heads of compensation, and Colorado and North Dakota, whose surface damage statutes were read separately.

La. Rev. Stat. § 31:22

The owner of a mineral servitude is under no obligation to exercise it. If he does, he is entitled to use only so much of the land as is reasonably necessary to conduct his operations, and he is obligated, insofar as practicable, to restore the surface to its original condition at the earliest reasonable time. Separately, the owner of land burdened by a mineral right and the owner of the mineral right must each exercise their rights with reasonable regard for those of the other, and so must the owners of separate mineral rights in the same land. A reservation of mineral rights in an instrument transferring land must mention surface rights in the exercise of the rights reserved unless the parties expressly provide otherwise, and the Code sets out wording that satisfies that requirement.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at articles 22 and 11 of the Mineral Code. Three sentences do what Texas needed the accommodation doctrine for and what Kentucky puts inside a compensation section: the reasonable-necessity limit and a restoration duty are stated as an ordinary incident of the right, in the code, in plain terms. Article 11 then adds something no other state on this record has. It is a drafting rule: a reservation of minerals in a deed of the land MUST mention surface rights unless the parties expressly provide otherwise, and the legislature supplies the paragraph that satisfies it, which the article sets out verbatim. That is a statute telling conveyancers what to write, and it exists because the surface consequences of a reservation are exactly what old instruments left out. Subsection B was amended in 2006 and again in 2023. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether a failure to include the required mention has any consequence for the reservation, and any Louisiana decision on the restoration obligation, which is heavily litigated.

Maine Department of Environmental Protection, Metallic Mineral Mining and Advanced Exploration

Maine modernised its metallic mineral mining regime through a two part rulemaking the Legislature directed in April 2012, and the result is a graduated set of thresholds rather than a single permit requirement. In the first phase the Department of Environmental Protection clarified the permit requirements for exploration and advanced exploration. Exploration activities, which limit excavations to a maximum surface opening of no more than three hundred square feet, require no permit at all; instead the person exploring must submit a work plan and meet performance standards designed to protect natural resources and properly restore the exploration site. Advanced exploration is subject to a two tier permitting process creating a graduated scale by environmental impact, where Tier One activities involve the excavation and removal of up to two thousand tons of material and Tier Two activities up to ten thousand tons. Metallic mineral mining and advanced exploration are regulated under the Maine Metallic Mineral Mining Act at Title 38 sections 490-LL to 490-TT, enacted by Public Law 2011 chapter 653, with the operative detail in the department's Chapter 200 rules. Quarrying is a separate regime again, with its own notice of intent to comply and variance criteria under Chapter 378.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection's own mining page on 2026-08-03, with the quoted definition read at 38 M.R.S. s. 490-MM(11) the same day. The three hundred square feet figure is the one worth knowing, because it is the line below which somebody can be excavating on land without any permit having been applied for, and therefore without the notice that a permit application would generate. What a landowner gets instead at that level is a work plan and performance standards, both administered rather than published to neighbours. WHAT THIS RULE IS NOT: it is not a statement that Maine gives a surface owner nothing, because the Maine Metallic Mineral Mining Act itself, ss. 490-LL to 490-TT, was NOT read beyond the definitions section, and neither were the Chapter 200 rules. A landowner consent, notice or damages provision inside that Act has not been excluded and this page does not claim it has. That is a real gap and it is listed in the gaps below rather than papered over. The two tier tonnage thresholds and the 2012 rulemaking history come from the department's page rather than from the statute.

Md. Code, Environment s. 14-107.1, Hydraulic fracturing prohibited

A person may not engage in the hydraulic fracturing of a well for the exploration or production of oil or natural gas in the State. The section defines hydraulic fracturing for itself as a stimulation treatment performed on oil and natural gas wells in low permeability oil or natural gas reservoirs through which specially engineered fluids are pumped at high pressure and rate into the reservoir interval to be treated, causing fractures to open. There is no permit exception and no moratorium language: the prohibition is flat. A separate section forbids drilling for oil or gas in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, any of its tributaries, or in the Chesapeake Bay Critical Area, notwithstanding any other law. And the general permit provisions require the Department to DENY a permit where the proposed drilling or well operation poses a substantial threat to public safety or a risk of significant adverse environmental impact to, among other things, the Chesapeake Bay, its Critical Area, tidal or nontidal wetlands, endangered or threatened species or their habitat, historic properties, populated areas, freshwater estuarine or marine fisheries, or other significant natural resources.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Md. Code, Environment ss. 14-107.1, 14-107 and 14-108 on 2026-08-03. THERE ARE THREE OUTRIGHT STATUTORY BANS ON THIS RECORD AND MARYLAND IS THE MIDDLE ONE BY DATE: Vermont 2012, Maryland 2017, Washington 2019. This note said Washington was the only other one until Vermont was read on 2026-08-03, and the dates are much of the comparison. The drafting differs three ways worth knowing. Washington's section preserves hydraulic fracturing for other purposes expressly; Maryland's is confined by its own terms to a well FOR THE EXPLORATION OR PRODUCTION OF OIL OR NATURAL GAS, which reaches the same result by definition rather than by proviso; and Vermont's does neither, prohibiting the activity flat and then, alone of the three, forbidding any person in the State to collect, store or treat wastewater from hydraulic fracturing, which reaches waste generated in another state. Set this beside what it means for everything else on this page. Maryland has a dormant mineral act that can take an unused oil and gas interest away from you, and a prohibition on the technique by which almost all remaining American shale gas is produced. The two together are the reason the practical question for most Maryland mineral owners is a title question rather than a development question. Note that the ban does not touch coal, which is regulated separately by the Bureau of Mines in Allegany and Garrett counties, nor non coal mining. WHAT IS NOT READ: the 2017 session law and its legislative history, and whether any Maryland well is producing by conventional means.

Md. Code, Environment s. 14-112, Distance from property boundary

A well for the production or underground storage of gas or oil may not be drilled nearer than one thousand feet to the boundary of the property except by agreement with the owners of the gas and oil on adjacent lands, and a coalbed methane well may not be drilled nearer than five hundred feet except by agreement with the owners of coalbed methane on adjacent lands. Where it is impossible to site a well the required distance from the boundary and no agreement has been made, a well may be located nearer with the consent of the Department, but when such a permit is applied for the Department must notify every landowner, royalty owner or leaseholder within the required minimum distance of the proposed well, give them a reasonable opportunity to file objections, and hold a hearing. If it then determines the well must be nearer it may issue the permit, and any landowner, royalty owner or leaseholder within the distance has a right to a rehearing and an appeal to the courts. A request for a rehearing or an appeal stays the authority granted under the permit until the permit is finally determined. The Department prescribes by regulation the distance between any two wells on a property.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Md. Code, Environment s. 14-112 on 2026-08-03. This is what Maryland has instead of correlative rights machinery, and it belongs to the neighbouring MINERAL owner rather than to the surface owner. The default rule is a private veto: within a thousand feet of the line, the adjacent oil and gas owners have to agree. What replaces the veto where agreement is impossible is a notice, an objection, a hearing, a rehearing and an appeal, and the stay is the part with teeth, because an appeal suspends the permit rather than merely reviewing it afterwards. Notice runs to every LANDOWNER, ROYALTY OWNER OR LEASEHOLDER within the distance, which is a wider class than the agreement limb reaches and includes people with no power to block the well at all. Set the thousand feet against Idaho, read the same day, where in the absence of a spacing order an oil well sits on a forty acre unit with a three hundred and thirty foot setback and a gas well on six hundred and forty acres with six hundred and sixty feet. Maryland's is the longer distance and does a different job: Idaho's setbacks protect the unit's geometry, Maryland's protects the neighbour's ability to say no. WHAT IS NOT READ: the Department's regulations on well to well spacing, and whether any Maryland permit has been contested this way.

MGL c. 40 § 21, Powers of cities and towns to make by-laws

A city or town may make by-laws for prohibiting or regulating the removal of soil, loam, sand or gravel from land not in public use, in the whole or in specified districts of the town, and for requiring the erection of a fence or barrier around such an area and the finished grading of it. The superior court has jurisdiction in equity to compel compliance with any such by-law. The penalty is fifty dollars for a first offence and a hundred for a second. That is the entire statutory framework read here for the extraction of aggregate in Massachusetts. The clause defines nothing: not soil, not loam, not sand, not gravel, not removal. It sets no standard a by-law must meet, requires no permit, provides no notice to an abutter, gives an abutter no right to object, requires no reclamation beyond a fence and a finished grade, and requires no bond.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at MGL c. 40 § 21(17) on 2026-08-03. Set it beside New Hampshire, read the same week, because the two states delegate the same subject to the same level of government and one of them does the work first. New Hampshire's RSA 155-E defines EARTH as sand, gravel, rock, soil or construction aggregate produced by quarrying, crushing or any other mining activity or other naturally occurring unconsolidated materials that normally mask the bedrock; defines an excavation, an excavation site and an excavation area; expressly excludes dimension stone; names which municipal body is the regulator in four different situations; requires a permit; and builds a per unit excavation tax on the same definitions. Massachusetts writes one sentence and hands the whole subject to whatever a town cares to enact, and the two words it uses for the material, soil and loam, are not defined anywhere read. Vermont, read the same day, is a third answer again and closer to Massachusetts's: no extraction statute at all, and quarrying permitted through a general land use act whose test is acreage. WHAT IS NOT READ, AND NO NEGATIVE ABOUT SURFACE OWNER PROTECTION IS PUBLISHED FOR MASSACHUSETTS: the Wetlands Protection Act, the zoning act at c. 40A, any municipal by-law, and the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act. A pit next to a Massachusetts parcel may be heavily regulated by instruments this record has not read, and the silence here is a silence about what was read.

MCL 324.61506(c)

Michigan's statutory protection for land above an oil or gas operation is exercised by the supervisor of wells, who is empowered to require that wells be located, drilled, cased, operated and plugged in a manner that prevents pollution of, damage to, or destruction of fresh water supplies, including inland lakes and streams and the Great Lakes.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at the supervisor of wells powers section. This is on the page as Michigan's surface-use answer because on the reading done here it is what Michigan has: a regulator empowered to impose requirements, rather than a statute giving the surface owner a right against the operator. That is a real difference from every other state on this record. Oklahoma gives notice, good faith negotiation, court appraisers and treble damages; North Dakota gives compensation for lost land value with attorney fees shifted; New Mexico gives notice and a mandated draft agreement; Ohio gives restoration deadlines; Colorado gives a statutory accommodation duty; Texas gives the accommodation doctrine. Michigan, so far as this pass established, gives the supervisor powers. The detailed requirements are in administrative rules that were not read, and no Michigan surface damages statute was found, which is stated as what was found rather than as proof that none exists.

MCL 324.61506(p)

The supervisor of wells may require owners, producers and operators to file surety, security or cash bonds in whatever form, condition, term and amount will ensure compliance with the oil and gas part of the Act and with the rules and orders issued under it, and to provide for their release.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at the same section. Recorded because a bond is the thing actually standing behind a regulator's requirements when an operator does not meet them, and because Michigan's is framed differently from the two other bonding regimes on this record: Colorado sets per-well financial assurance figures in its rules and Oklahoma sets a single statewide sum in its statute, while Michigan leaves form, condition, term and amount to the supervisor. What a surface owner can actually claim against such a bond, if anything, was not read and is not stated here.

Minn. Stat. § 93.05

Where state lands were sold with the minerals reserved, the holder of a mineral lease later issued on them may enter and prospect. But before entering, the lease holder must pay or secure to the owner of the lands all damages which may arise, fixed either by mutual agreement or, failing agreement, by condemnation proceedings brought in the name of the state, in which the state bears no part of the cost and pays no part of the damages awarded. On the lessee's request and with the commissioner's approval the attorney general may condemn land, rights-of-way, drainage or flowage rights and easements needed for the mining, all at the lessee's expense, and in any such proceeding the land's value for depositing stripping, tailings or other wastes, or for buildings connected with nearby mining operations, must be considered in the damages awarded.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Minn. Stat. § 93.05, subdivisions 1 to 3. READ THE SCOPE BEFORE USING THIS. It applies where STATE lands were sold with the minerals reserved. It is not a general rule about privately severed minerals and it must not be described as one. Within its scope it is among the strongest surface protections on this record, and for a reason of structure rather than of generosity: payment or security comes BEFORE entry rather than as a remedy afterwards, which is the opposite of the ordinary damages statute, and Wyoming and Colorado condition entry without going that far. The clause with no parallel here is in subdivision 3: where the lessee condemns land for the mining, the value the land has because it could be used for depositing stripping or tailings, or for buildings serving mining nearby, must be counted in what the owner is paid. Every other surface damages provision on this record values what the owner LOSES. This one requires valuing what the operator GAINS. Note also that § 93.55 subd. 3 expressly withholds these condemnation rights from a lease of a forfeited severed interest as against the overlying surface.

Minn. Stat. ch. 93, table of sections

No provision requiring the holder of a privately severed Minnesota mineral interest to pay the surface owner for damage, or to accommodate their use, was found in the state's minerals chapter. The instrument is an enumeration of the complete table of sections for chapter 93, Lands and Minerals: the word surface appears in exactly one heading, section 93.33, Leasing Surface of Land, which is about leasing the surface of state land; damage appears in none; landowner appears in none. Lease appears 14 times, sever 3, forfeit once and royalty once, which is what shows the instrument reaching the material it should.

Checked August 1, 2026. Established on 2026-08-01 by enumerating the Revisor's own table of sections for chapter 93, 9,420 characters, and counting terms across it with four non-zero controls. This rule is PARTIAL and the limit is precisely statable: a table of sections is HEADINGS, so this is the Nebraska instrument, which enumerated 229 catchlines, rather than the Illinois one, which searched every word of an act. A duty buried in a subdivision under an unrelated catchline would not show up, and no other chapter was enumerated. What supports the reading is that it fits the rest of the state: § 93.05, the one entry-and-damages rule found, is confined to state mineral reservations, and Minnesota has essentially no oil and gas industry, which is where surface damages statutes came from in the states that have them. If it holds, Minnesota joins Michigan as a state on this record with no surface damages statute found, and the reader's answer is that it is governed by the severance instrument and the common law. WHAT IS NOT READ: the full text of chapter 93, any provision in the mining or environmental chapters, and any Minnesota decision on the mineral owner's right to use the surface.

Miss. Code Ann. § 53-3-25, with §§ 53-1-1 to 53-1-77 and 53-3-1 to 53-3-203 read end to end

Mississippi gives a surface owner over a split estate no statutory notice, no negotiation period, no damage formula, no bond payable to them and no seat at a hearing. This is a negative and it was established by reading rather than by searching. Chapters 1 and 3 of Title 53, which together are the whole of Mississippi's oil and gas conservation law, were walked end to end through the mirror's own Previous and Next chain, seventy-five sections in total, and THE PHRASE SURFACE OWNER APPEARS ZERO TIMES in either. What the chapters do instead is regulate the operator towards the Board and towards the resource. Miss. Code 53-3-11 requires anyone proposing to drill in search of oil or gas to apply for a permit before commencing; 53-3-25 requires a filing before drilling begins; 53-3-27, 53-3-29, 53-3-31 and 53-3-33 require separate filings before a stratigraphic test or a well below the freshwater level, before an injection well, before reworking an abandoned well to an injection well, and before recompleting a well to another zone. Every one of those duties runs to the State Oil and Gas Board. None of them requires the person who owns and lives on the surface to be told anything. Compare the states on this record that do legislate here. North Dakota makes the developer pay for lost land value, lost use and lost improvements, and pay the owner's lawyer if the owner beats the offer in court. New Mexico requires thirty days' notice, a copy of the Act and a proposed agreement on twelve subjects. Tennessee gives certified mail, fifteen working days to object and a hearing in the owner's own county. Mississippi does none of this, so a Mississippi surface owner's protection is whatever the instrument that severed the estates says, plus the common law of reasonable use, and neither is in the code.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04. The quote is the substance of Miss. Code 53-3-25 and is given because it is representative of the whole pattern: the duty runs to the Board and not to the surface owner. The negative rests on chapters 53-1 (thirty sections) and 53-3 (forty-five sections across two passes, the second confirmed to have reached the chapter boundary) being read end to end, with the phrase counted in the pulled text of every section. Whether Mississippi case law supplies an accommodation doctrine was not read and is stated in the gaps.

RSMo s. 444.010, Mineral land owner to post conditions

When a person owning real estate in Missouri, or holding a recorded mining leasehold from the owner, permits anybody other than their own servants, agents or employees to enter and dig or mine for lead, ore or other minerals with their consent, they must keep a printed statement of the terms, conditions and requirements on which the land may be mined or prospected, and of the time during which that right continues, posted or hung up in a conspicuous place, in plain legible characters, in their principal office or place of business in the county where the land is or in a contiguous county. They must also deliver a printed copy to any person mining, prospecting, or about to mine or prospect on the land who asks for one. All persons digging or mining on the land after the statement is posted are deemed to have agreed to and accepted its terms and are bound by them along with the owner. On failure or refusal to comply with those terms the miner forfeits all right under them, and the owner may re-enter and take possession; and the owner's receipt of ore after a forfeiture has been incurred is not a waiver of the forfeiture.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at RSMo s. 444.010 on 2026-08-03. RSMo 1939 s. 14783, and its prior revisions run back through 1929, 1919 and 1909, so this is nineteenth century Missouri lead district practice frozen into the statute book and never repealed. Chapter 444 is titled RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF MINERS AND MINE OWNERS and it sits in title XXIX, Ownership and Conveyance of Property, alongside the deeds and conveyancing chapters rather than in a mining or environmental title, which tells you the legislature treated the miner's position as a property relationship. Nothing else on this record does anything like this. The nearest comparisons are about the opposite party: Idaho's chapter 47-9 lets a mining claim owner CONDEMN a right of way over somebody else's land, and Hawaii's s. 182-3 lets an occupier elect arbitration of the damages and rent. Missouri instead regulates the bargain between a landowner and a stranger who wants to dig, and does it by requiring the terms to be on the wall. The mechanism is worth naming for what it is: a statutory posting requirement that converts a notice into a contract, since anybody who digs after the posting is DEEMED to have agreed to the terms. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether the chapter is used today, any Missouri decision on it, and whether a modern mining lease is drafted around it.

RSMo s. 444.020, Failure to post statement of conditions, effect

Where an owner or mining lessee permits somebody other than their own servants, agents or employees to enter and dig for lead ore or other minerals with their consent but WITHOUT complying with the posting requirement, and that person has in good faith dug or opened any shaft, mine, quarry, prospect or deposit of mineral, or extended or opened any room, drift, entry or other excavation from one, then they have the exclusive right, as against the owner or lessee who gave the consent and against anybody claiming through them, to continue to work, mine and dig what they opened, WITH A RIGHT OF WAY over the land for the purpose of mining, for three years from the date the consent was given. It is forfeited if they fail to work it for ten days, not counting Sundays, in any one calendar month after commencing, unless the failure was caused by unavoidable circumstances or by the act of the owner or their agent, or unless the owner consents. They must pay royalty at least once every month if the owner demands it, delivered at or near the mouth of the mine, at the owner's nearest usual place of business, or wherever else is agreed. And unless the parties agree otherwise, the royalty is the same in kind and proportionate amount as is paid by others mining the same kind of ore on the same land; and if nobody else is mining there on terms the owner has prescribed, the same rate and kind as is paid by miners on the nearest lands belonging to other people. The owner has a lien on all minerals dug for the royalty due until it is paid, and non payment on demand forfeits the right to work and lets the owner re-enter.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at RSMo s. 444.020 on 2026-08-03. This is the sanction that gives s. 444.010 its teeth, and it is a real one: an owner who lets somebody dig without posting terms loses control of that working for three years and cannot charge more than the going local rate. THE ROYALTY MECHANISM IS THE PART THAT IS NOT ON THIS RECORD ANYWHERE ELSE. Idaho supplies a default royalty of twelve and a half per cent by statute, North Carolina a floor of the same figure that costs may not touch, and Idaho's pooling statute gives a non electing owner the highest bonus per acre anybody in the unit got. All of those are numbers or comparisons inside a single transaction. Missouri's default is neither a number nor a lease term: it is CUSTOM, measured first by what other miners pay the same owner on the same ground and then, failing that, by what miners pay on the nearest land in different ownership. A statute that sets a price by looking over the fence is a nineteenth century device and it is still the law. Note the shape of the ten day rule too, because it is a use requirement running the other way from every dormancy statute on this record: here it is the MINER whose right lapses for inactivity, at ten working days a month, and the excuses are stated. WHAT IS NOT READ: any Missouri decision construing the neighbourhood royalty, and whether it has ever been applied.

Mont. Code Ann. § 82-10-503

A Montana oil and gas developer or operator must give the surface owner, and any purchaser under contract for deed, written notice of planned drilling operations no more than 180 days and no fewer than 20 days before any activity that disturbs the land surface. The notice goes to the addresses shown in the county clerk and recorder's records, must disclose the plan of work well enough for the owner to evaluate its effect, and must enclose a copy of the surface damage part itself together with the state's guide to split estates where one is available.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 82-10-503. The requirement to enclose the statute itself is the same idea as New Mexico's, and Montana goes one step further by requiring a plain-language guide to split estates to go with it, which no other state on this record requires. The window is worth noting in both directions: not fewer than 20 days, so the notice is not a formality served on the morning of the work, and not more than 180 days, so a notice cannot be banked years in advance. Three limits are in the text. The surface owner may waive the notice. The surface owner, not the operator, is responsible for passing the operator's name and address to lessees and tenants who are responsible for surface operations. And before that notice is given, a person qualified under section 70-16-111 may already enter to investigate boundary evidence and perform boundary, well site location and access road surveys if that section's own notice requirements are met, which was not read for this record.

Mont. Code Ann. § 82-10-504

A Montana oil and gas developer or operator must negotiate in good faith and pay the surface owner compensation equal to the damages sustained for loss of agricultural production and income, lost land value and lost value of improvements. The surface owner may elect annual payments rather than a lump sum, except that harm from exploration alone must be compensated in a single sum, and an operator who misses an annual instalment by more than 60 days after notice owes twice the unpaid amount.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 82-10-504. Two provisions here have no equivalent elsewhere on this record. The surface owner can elect to take the money annually over time rather than as one payment, which changes what the compensation is for. And the parties may enter a dispute resolution process including mediation at either party's request and on mutual agreement, which is a softer mechanism than North Dakota's fee shifting or Oklahoma's court-appointed appraisers. Two others read as distinctive and are not, and this note said otherwise until Wyoming was read on 2026-07-31. Subsection (1)(e) provides that a person may not reserve or assign damage and disruption compensation apart from the surface estate except to a tenant of the surface estate, so the right to be paid for surface damage cannot be split off and sold the way the minerals themselves were; North Dakota and West Virginia each bar the same thing in the same shape, and Wyoming bars it flatly with no tenant exception on its face. The doubling penalty for a late annual instalment is carried by Wyoming's section 30-5-405 in nearly the same words and on the same sixty day trigger. Payments may cover only land directly affected by operations and production. What was not read is the rest of the part: sections 82-10-505 through 82-10-511, covering liability for damages to property, notification of injury, the offer of settlement and its rejection, the penalty for a notice violation, and the provision that these remedies are cumulative.

Neb. Rev. Stat. § 57-905

The Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission may require a reasonable bond with good and sufficient surety conditioned on compliance with Nebraska law and the commission's rules, regulations and orders, and must periodically evaluate the financial assurance requirements on existing and proposed wells to ensure the ability to pay the costs of plugging, abandonment and surface restoration. It may also require wells to be drilled, cased, operated and plugged so as to prevent oil or gas escaping from one stratum to another, the intrusion of water into oil or gas strata, the pollution of fresh water supplies by oil, gas or salt water, and to prevent blowouts, cave-ins, seepages and fires. Behind the bond sits the Well Plugging and Abandonment Trust Fund, funded by a fee of up to two hundred dollars a year for each well that has been inactive two years or longer, which the commission uses to plug and abandon wells and complete the required surface restoration where the bonded operator cannot meet its obligation.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 57-905 and 57-923. THE NEGATIVE MATTERS MORE THAN THE RULE AND HERE IS THE INSTRUMENT BEHIND IT. All 229 section catchlines in Chapter 57, the chapter titled Oil, Gas, and Other Minerals, were enumerated from the Legislature's own chapter index and searched. The word "surface" appears in none of them. Controls confirm the search works: "landowner" returns four sections, "abandon" five, "pooling" two, "royalty" one. The two catchlines containing "damage" are about easements across public lands and about injuring a pipeline. So Nebraska has no surface damage act, no statutory notice to a surface owner before drilling, no accommodation provision and no surface use agreement requirement anywhere in that chapter, and the surface owner's protection is that the state holds money against the site being restored. What that instrument cannot exclude is a duty inside a section whose catchline does not mention the surface, a provision in another chapter, or a common law rule; the text of sections 57-905 and 57-906 was read and neither imposes anything on an operator towards a surface owner. Nebraska's regulations at Title 267 have not been read at all and are the obvious next place to look.

NRS 519A.250, Operator required to provide Division of Minerals copy of filing of plan of operation submitted to federal agency

Nevada regulates what a mining operation does to the land through permitting and reclamation owed to the state, not through rights owed to a private surface owner. A person who wants to conduct a mining operation must file an application with the Division for a permit for each location, naming the applicant and, for a company, everyone with a controlling interest, and the permit carries conditions and a bond. Violations are a misdemeanour and carry a civil penalty set against a schedule the Commission adopts, alongside injunctions and other remedies. The provision that says most about how mining in Nevada actually works is the reporting one: an operator required by federal law to file a plan of operation, or an amended plan, with the United States Bureau of Land Management or the United States Forest Service for mining or exploration on public land administered by a federal agency must give the Division of Minerals a copy within thirty days of its approval.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at NRS 519A.210, 519A.250 and 519A.280 on 2026-08-01, with the whole of chapter 519A fetched, 52,265 characters. The negative in this rule was established by counting over that complete chapter and it is worth recording exactly: occurrences of the phrase surface owner 0, and of owner of the land 0, against controls of reclamation 79 and bond 28. So Nevada's reclamation chapter does not address a private surface owner at all. Set beside the earlier finding that NRS 111 never uses the word mineral, the picture is consistent rather than accidental: the split estate problem this site is largely about is not what Nevada's statutes are written around, because most Nevada minerals are not in private hands to begin with. The detailed contents of the reclamation plan, and the bond amounts, were not read.

RSA 155-E:1 and 155-E:2, Local Regulation of Excavations

No owner may permit any excavation of earth on their premises without first obtaining a permit, subject to exceptions for excavations that lawfully existed as of 24 August 1979 and from which commercially useful quantities had been removed in the two years before that date. Such a pre-existing excavation site is exempt from local zoning or similar ordinances regulating its location, provided it complied with whatever ordinances were in effect when it was first begun, but the excavation area may not be expanded beyond the limits of the town without a permit. The body that grants the permit is not a state agency. The regulator is defined as the planning board of the city or town, or, where a town at an annual or special meeting duly warned for the purpose so provides, the selectmen of the town or the board of adjustment; or where there is no planning board, the selectmen of the town or the legislative body of the city; or where the land area is in an unincorporated place, the county commissioners.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at RSA 155-E:1, III and 155-E:2 on 2026-08-03. Every other state on this record answers the question WHO REGULATES with the name of a state body: a department of environmental protection or quality, a geological survey, an oil and gas commission or conservation council, a department of natural resources or of lands. New Hampshire answers it with the town, and the chapter's own title says so, being Local Regulation of Excavations. That has a consequence for a reader which the statute does not state and this page will: there is no single place to look. The permit file for an excavation next to a New Hampshire parcel is at the municipal offices of that municipality, decided by whichever of three or four bodies that municipality uses, and no state database was found that aggregates them. Set that beside South Carolina's Active Mines Viewer and Missouri's map of permitted mine sites, both read the same day, and the difference in what an owner can find out in an afternoon is large. WHAT IS NOT READ, and it is a real gap on the topic this rule sits under: the rest of RSA 155-E, so what standards a regulator applies, what notice an abutter gets, whether an abutter can object, and what reclamation is required were all seen only in outline or by cross reference. No negative about surface owner protection is published for New Hampshire.

N.J.S.A. § 46:3-29, with §§ 13:1M-1 to 13:1M-18 read end to end

A New Jersey surface owner over a split estate gets no statutory notice before drilling, no negotiation period, no damage formula, no bond payable to them and no hearing right. That negative was established by reading: N.J.S.A. 13:1M-1 to 13:1M-18, the whole of New Jersey's oil and gas law, was walked end to end and THE PHRASE SURFACE OWNER APPEARS IN IT NOWHERE. What the chapter does instead is run every duty to the department. Compare the states on this record that legislate here. North Dakota makes the developer pay for lost land value, lost use and lost improvements and pay the owner's lawyer if the owner beats the offer in court. New Mexico requires thirty days' notice, a copy of the Act and a proposed agreement on twelve subjects. Tennessee gives certified mail, fifteen working days to object and a hearing in the owner's own county. New Jersey gives none of it. There are two partial exceptions and both are worth knowing precisely. The first is real but narrow: N.J.S.A. 13:1M-11 requires at least five days' notice before a well is plugged and abandoned, and the notice runs to the State Geologist, TO THE OWNER OF THE LAND UPON WHICH THE WELL IS LOCATED, to the owners or agents of adjoining land, and to adjoining well owners. So a New Jersey landowner is told when a well is being closed and is not told when one is being opened. The second is not in the extraction law at all. N.J.S.A. 46:3-29, the definitions section of the private transfer fee statute enacted as P.L.2010 c.102, is defining what is NOT a private transfer fee when it says, of consideration payable by a grantee to a grantor for an interest in real property: FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS SUBSECTION, AN INTEREST IN REAL PROPERTY MAY INCLUDE A SEPARATE MINERAL ESTATE AND ITS APPURTENANT SURFACE ACCESS RIGHTS. That single clause is the New Jersey Legislature saying both that a mineral estate can exist separately from the surface and that it carries appurtenant surface access rights, and it says it inside a statute about something else entirely. It is the closest thing in the New Jersey code to a statement of what a mineral owner may do on the surface, and it is a definition rather than a rule, so it settles nothing about accommodation, reasonable use or damages. Those are common law here and no case law was read for this page.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from N.J.S.A. 46:3-29 on the verbatim mirror. The negative rests on chapter 1M of Title 13 walked end to end, eighteen sections, END OF CHAIN reached at 13:1M-18, with the phrase counted in the pulled text of every section rather than from a search. The comparisons to North Dakota, New Mexico and Tennessee were taken from those states' own entries on this record. Note what the quoted clause is doing grammatically: it is expanding what counts as an interest in real property for the purposes of an EXCLUSION from the private transfer fee ban, so it is an aside and not an operative grant.

N.J.S.A. § 13:1M-18

N.J.S.A. 13:1M-18 is the section that decides who really governs extraction in New Jersey, and it points downwards. Nothing in the act shall be construed to supersede or prohibit the adoption by the governing body of ANY MUNICIPALITY OR COUNTY of any ordinance or resolution REGULATING OR PROHIBITING the exploration beyond the reconnaissance phase, drilling for, and the extraction of OIL AND NATURAL GAS OR URANIUM. Note the three things in that sentence a reader should not skim. It permits prohibition and not merely regulation. It reaches counties as well as municipalities. And it names uranium alongside oil and gas, which no other provision of the chapter does. The section then defines reconnaissance, which is the line below which local power does not reach: a geologic and MINERAL RESOURCE APPRAISAL of a region by searching and analysing published literature, aerial photography and geologic maps; geophysical, geochemical and remote sensing techniques that do not involve road building, land clearing or introducing chemicals to land or water; surface geologic, topographic or other mapping and property surveying; and sample collections not involving excavation or drilling equipment or the introduction of chemicals. So desk study and non-invasive survey are beyond local control and everything past that is not. The State's role is a review rather than a veto: a municipality or county must file any ordinance or regulation pertaining to activities the act regulates with the department, which shall approve or disapprove within ninety days, and MAY DISAPPROVE ONLY IF IT FINDS THE ORDINANCE UNREASONABLE AND PROVIDES ITS REASONS IN WRITING. Set that against the other pole on this record. North Carolina invalidates local ordinances that regulate oil and gas exploration, development and production and gives an operator a petition to preempt one. Massachusetts sits in between, providing in its mining chapter that nothing supersedes local zoning, which preserves zoning without naming a power to prohibit. New Jersey names the power to prohibit. The practical consequence for a mineral owner is that the answer to whether the minerals under a New Jersey parcel can be produced at all may be an ordinance of one municipality rather than anything in the State code, and there is no statewide register of those ordinances on this page.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from N.J.S.A. 13:1M-18 on the verbatim mirror, chapter walked end to end. The North Carolina and Massachusetts comparisons were taken from those states' own entries on this record and not from memory. What was NOT read is any actual municipal or county ordinance, and no register of the ordinances filed with the department under subsection b. was found or fetched, so this page can say the power exists and cannot say which municipalities have used it.

N.M. Stat. Ann. § 70-12-5(B)

No less than thirty days before first entering the surface to conduct oil and gas operations a New Mexico operator must give the surface owner notice by certified mail or hand delivery, disclosing the planned operations, enclosing a copy of the Surface Owners Protection Act, giving the operator's contact details, and including a proposed surface use and compensation agreement.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read from an allowlisted mirror stating it is current as of January 1, 2024. This is the most prescriptive surface-use regime on this record because the statute dictates the contents of the proposed agreement rather than only requiring one. The subjects it must address, to the extent known, are the placement, specifications, maintenance and design of well pads, gathering pipelines and roads; terms of ingress and egress; construction, maintenance and placement of pits and equipment; use and impoundment of water; removal and restoration of plant life; surface water drainage changes; control of precipitation runoff and erosion; control of noise, weeds, dust, traffic, trespass, litter and interference with the surface owner's use; interim and final reclamation; actions to minimise surface damage; operator indemnification for injury to persons caused by the operator; and an offer of compensation for damages. A separate and shorter duty applies first: at least five business days' notice by certified mail or hand delivery before initial entry for activities that do not disturb the surface, such as inspections, staking, surveys and measurements.

N.M. Stat. Ann. § 70-12-5(A)

Before initial entry onto New Mexico land for activities that do not disturb the surface, including inspections, staking, surveys, measurements and general evaluation of proposed routes and sites, the operator must give the surface owner at least five business days' notice by certified mail or hand delivery.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read from the same mirror section, current as of January 1, 2024. Recorded separately from the thirty day duty because the two are separate obligations with separate triggers, and because this one is the earliest point at which a New Mexico surface owner is entitled to know that anything is coming. No other state on this record requires notice before a non-disturbing survey.

N.M. Stat. Ann. § 70-12-2

The Surface Owners Protection Act applies to private fee surface land, and to leasehold interests in any land where oil and gas operations are conducted when the tenant incurs damages to leasehold improvements as a result of those operations.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read from the same allowlisted mirror, current as of January 1, 2024. This section is on the page because the scope question is not academic in a state where the surface may be private fee, federal or state trust land, and the Act says in terms that it reaches private fee surface land. No figure for how much New Mexico surface falls into each category is published here, because none has been sourced. What it therefore does not tell a reader is what protections apply where the surface itself is federal or state land, and that gap is named in this page's not_covered rather than filled by inference.

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.C. Gen. Stat. s. 113-421, Presumptive liability for water contamination

North Carolina reverses the burden on water. It is presumed that an oil or gas developer or operator is responsible for contamination of all water supplies within a half mile radius of a wellhead that is part of its activities. The presumption can be rebutted only by proving, on the balance of probabilities, one of four things: that the contamination pre-dated drilling as shown by a pre-drilling test, that the owner refused access for that test, that the supply is not within half a mile, or that something else caused it. Where a contaminated supply is inside the radius the operator must, on top of any other remedy including damages, provide a replacement water supply adequate in quality and quantity to the surface owner and to everyone else who was using it. It must also compensate the surface owner for damage to a water supply in use beforehand, the cost of repairing personal property, and livestock, crops or timber at market value, must reclaim within two years, must post a bond running to the surface owner for that reclamation, and must post a bond to the State of at least one million dollars against environmental damage.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at G.S. 113-421 on 2026-08-02. Three things around the presumption are worth as much as the presumption itself. The surface owner chooses whether compensation comes as a single payment or as annual payments over a period of not less than ten years. Venue is the superior court of the county where the well is, and where the surface owner or their assignee wins an action for unpaid royalties or other damages the court SHALL award court costs and reasonable attorneys' fees to them. And subsection (d) makes conditions precedent, notice provisions and arbitration clauses in lease documents that have the effect of limiting access to that court void and unenforceable, which is the only provision on this record that voids an arbitration clause. Liability is joint and several among everyone having control over the activities that contributed. The pre-drilling testing that grounds the rebuttal is itself a required lease term at G.S. 113-423(f): every supply within half a mile tested at the operator's cost at least thirty days before drilling, then at six, twelve, eighteen and twenty four months after production starts and within thirty days of production ending, by an independent laboratory the surface owner selects from the Department's certified list, with all results public records the Department must post within thirty days. The surface owner may refuse the testing, and refusing it hands the operator one of its four defences.

N.C. Gen. Stat. s. 113-423.1, Surface activities

An operator must conduct oil and gas operations in a manner that accommodates the surface owner by minimising intrusion upon and damage to the surface, which the statute defines as selecting alternative locations for wells, roads, pipelines or production facilities, or employing alternative means of operation, where those are technologically sound, economically practicable and reasonably available. Failing that gives the surface owner a cause of action for compensatory damages and equitable relief. The procedure is what makes it bite: the surface owner must first show the use of the surface materially interfered with their own use, and once they have, the operator bears the burden of proving it minimised intrusion, after which the owner may rebut. The operator has an affirmative defence that it complied with a specific regulatory requirement, contractual obligation or land use plan provision, and the standard does not stop it using as much surface as is reasonable and necessary, nor override a contract that expressly provides for surface use or releases the operator.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at G.S. 113-423.1 on 2026-08-02, the section in full. This is an accommodation doctrine with the burden of proof written into the statute, which is what separates it from the accommodation standards on this record that leave the burden where the common law puts it. Set the burden shift beside the escape hatches in the same subsection, because both are real: an express contractual provision for surface use, or a release, is expressly preserved, and so is compliance with a regulatory requirement as an affirmative defence. The section also says in terms that it does not preclude any other remedy allowed by law, does not stop the parties addressing surface use in a lease or surface use agreement, and does not alter local government authority over land use, which sits awkwardly beside G.S. 113-415.1 invalidating local ordinances that regulate oil and gas exploration, development and production and giving an operator a petition to preempt one. That preemption section was read only to its catchline.

N.D.C.C. § 38-11.1-04

A North Dakota mineral developer must pay the surface owner, and any tenant, a sum equal to the damages sustained for lost land value, lost use of and access to the land, and lost value of improvements caused by drilling operations. Compensation may not be reserved or assigned away from the surface estate, except to a tenant of it.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 38-11.1-04 in the Century Code chapter PDF for chapter 38-11.1, which is headed Oil and Gas Production Damage Compensation. Two features are worth having in front of a surface owner. The anti-assignment provision means the right to this compensation cannot be stripped out of the surface estate by an earlier instrument, so a surface owner who bought land whose minerals were long since severed still holds it. And the amount may be fixed by any formula the parties mutually agree, with harm from exploration compensated by a single sum payment and consideration given to the period over which the loss occurs. The payments cover only land directly affected by drilling operations. Where owner and tenant have not agreed a division, the tenant recovers from the owner the portion attributable to the tenant's share of damages.

N.D.C.C. § 38-11.1-09

A North Dakota surface owner who rejects the developer's compensation offer may sue, and if the court awards more than was offered the court must award the owner reasonable attorney's fees, costs and disbursements, and interest on the final award running from the day drilling commenced at the Bank of North Dakota prime rate on the date of judgment.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 38-11.1-09. This is the provision that makes the compensation duty enforceable by an ordinary landowner rather than only by one who can fund litigation, and no other state on this record has anything like it: the word is shall, not may, and the trigger is simply beating the offer. Interest runs from the day drilling commenced rather than from judgment, at the prime rate charged by the Bank of North Dakota on the date of the judgment. Section 38-11.1-09.1 separately allows either party, within one year after an offer is rejected, to involve the North Dakota mediation service or another civil mediator, with the cost split equally if the parties cannot agree it. A pretrial appraisal requirement at section 38-11.1-07.1 was seen in the chapter and not read.

R.C. 1509.072(A)

An Ohio well owner must fill the waste pits and remove drilling supplies and equipment within fourteen days of completing drilling in an urbanized area or two months elsewhere, and must grade or terrace and then plant, seed or sod the disturbed area within three months of commencing surface drilling in an urbanized area or six months elsewhere, where that is necessary to bind the soil and prevent substantial erosion.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 1509.072, effective September 29, 2011 under House Bill 153 of the 129th General Assembly. Ohio's surface-use answer is a restoration regime on fixed deadlines rather than an accommodation doctrine or a damages negotiation, which makes it a fourth distinct shape across the states on this record. Division (B) imposes a second round of obligations after a producing well is plugged or a dry hole is abandoned: removing production and storage structures, supplies, equipment, oil, salt water and debris, filling remaining excavations, and grading and replanting, within three months in an urbanized area and six months elsewhere. The chief of the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management may approve a longer period, and the owner can be released from restoration duties on obtaining a written waiver, the remaining conditions of which were not read. Restoration is carried out in accordance with the restoration plan filed with the permit application under section 1509.06.

52 O.S. § 318.3

Before entering a site for oil or gas drilling in Oklahoma the operator must give the surface owner written notice of intent to drill, naming the proposed location and the approximate date drilling will begin, and within five days of that notice being delivered the operator and the surface owner both have a duty to enter good faith negotiations over surface damages.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the Legislature's complete-title PDF for Title 52. The notice requirement is in the first paragraph of the same section: before entering upon a site for oil or gas drilling the operator shall give the surface owner a written notice of intent to drill containing a designation of the proposed location and the approximate date the operator proposes to commence drilling. The section carves out cases of non-resident surface owners or tenants, unknown heirs, imperfect titles, and owners or tenants whose whereabouts cannot be ascertained with reasonable diligence, and allows constructive notice where an affidavit of diligent search is made. This is a statutory regime rather than the judge-made accommodation doctrine Texas uses, and it front-loads the obligation: the duty to negotiate arises before any dispute about reasonableness does.

52 O.S. § 318.5(A)

Before entering with heavy equipment an Oklahoma operator must negotiate surface damages with the surface owner. If they agree and sign a written contract the operator may enter. If they do not agree, the operator petitions the district court to appoint appraisers, and once that petition is filed the operator may enter and drill.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the same complete-title PDF for Title 52. This is the limit of the surface owner's leverage under the Act and it is the counterpart of the Texas rule that an operator with only one method may use it: refusing to sign does not stop the well, it converts the dispute into a valuation proceeding that runs in parallel with drilling. The section requires ten days' notice of the petition to appoint appraisers, by personal service, by leaving a copy at the party's usual residence with a family member over fifteen, or by publication for non-residents and persons whose whereabouts cannot be ascertained. The appraisers' report, the procedure for exceptions to it and the right to a jury trial are in the remainder of the section and in Section 318.6, which were not read in full.

52 O.S. § 318.4(A)

Every operator doing business in Oklahoma must post twenty-five thousand dollars with the Secretary of State, as a surety bond, bank letter of credit, cash or certificate of deposit, to cover location damages it cannot otherwise pay.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the same complete-title PDF for Title 52. The Secretary of State holds the security for the benefit of the surface owners of the state and must ensure it is in a form readily payable to a surface owner awarded damages. Note the shape of this differs from Colorado's, where financial assurance is per well and posted with the energy regulator, and is triggered by the absence of a surface use agreement; Oklahoma's is a single statewide sum per operator, posted with the Secretary of State, and required of every operator regardless of agreement. The remainder of the section, including any provision for increasing the sum or for release, was not read.

52 O.S. § 318.9

An Oklahoma operator who willfully and knowingly fails to keep the required bond posted, or fails to notify the surface owner before entering, or fails to reach agreement and does not ask the court for appraisers, shall pay treble damages to the surface owner at the direction of the court.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the same complete-title PDF for Title 52. The section also provides a separate route to treble damages on clear, cogent and convincing evidence that the operator willfully and knowingly entered the premises to commence drilling before giving notice of entry or without the surface owner's agreement, and states that noncompliance is a fact question determinable without a jury and reviewed de novo on appeal. This is the enforcement half of the Oklahoma regime and it is what makes the notice and negotiation duties more than advisory.

ORS s. 517.128, Restricting access to open mining area or mining claim prohibited

Nothing read in Oregon's mineral resources title gives a surface owner a claim for damages against a mineral owner, a right to be consulted, a right to consent, or an accommodation standard. The surface owner appears in these chapters twice and both times as information on a permit application: an exploration permit application must give the name and address of the surface owner and mineral owner, and an operating permit application must give the name and address of the landowner, the owner of the surface estate, the operator and any parent corporations. What the statutes do provide runs the other way. A person may not attempt to restrict access to any open mining area or valid mining claim, or to harass or interfere in any way with a person engaged in lawful mining activities. A person commits the crime of mineral trespass, a Class C misdemeanour, by intentionally and without the permission of the claim holder entering a posted mining claim and disturbing or removing minerals, tampering with a flume, rocker box, bedrock sluice, sluice box, dredge, quartz mill or other mining equipment at a posted claim, or defacing a location stake, side post, corner post, landmark, monument or posted written notice within one. And a person commits the crime of interfering with a mining operation, also a Class C misdemeanour, by intentionally interfering with or stopping a lawful small scale mining operation.

Checked August 2, 2026. The negative was established on 2026-08-02 by enumeration with controls and not by any search. The instrument is the complete text of all four chapters of Title 43, Mineral Resources, fetched in four requests: ORS 516 at 53,867 characters, ORS 517 at 403,942, ORS 520 at 95,218 and ORS 522 at 160,798. Counted case-insensitively across all four, SURFACE DAMAGE returns 0, ACCOMMODAT 0, CONSENT OF THE SURFACE 0, CONSENT OF THE OWNER 0, REASONABLE USE 0 and WRITTEN CONSENT 0. SURFACE OWNER returns 2 and SURFACE ESTATE 1, all three in permit applications and inspected individually. DAMAGES returns 0 in 516, 517 and 520, and 2 in 522, both of them at ss. 522.080 and 522.155 making a well operator liable to any person or public agency that sustains damages from failure to comply with a permit condition protecting GROUND WATER; that is a water provision capable of reaching a surface owner and this record does not call it a surface damage act. The controls are what make the zeros mean something: PERMIT returns 397 in 517 alone and 503 across the four, RECLAMATION 195, NOTICE 180, LANDOWNER 25, LEASE 27 and ROYALTY 12. The positives were read at ORS 517.128, 517.130 and 517.133, all enacted by 1999 c.354, with an exemption at 517.135 for conduct required or authorised by law or judicial decree or performed by a public servant in the reasonable exercise of official powers. Those four sections carry an editorial note that they were enacted into law but were not added to or made a part of ORS chapter 517 or any series therein by legislative action, which affects where they sit in the code and not whether they are in force. THE LIMIT: this is a four-chapter enumeration over the title about minerals. It cannot exclude a surface protection sitting in the property or land use titles, and neither ORS 105 nor Oregon's land use statutes were enumerated for one.

ORS s. 517.750, Definitions for ORS 517.702 to 517.989

The definitions for Oregon's mined land reclamation statutes define landowner to mean the person possessing fee title to the natural mineral deposit being surface mined or explored, and the owner of an equitable interest in land subject to a deed of trust. It does not mean the owner of the surface. That definition governs every use of the word across ORS 517.702 to 517.989, which is the whole reclamation and operating permit regime. It matters because those sections put real duties on the landowner: a landowner or operator may not allow or engage in surface mining on land not surface mined on July 1, 1972 without a valid operating permit, and where the landowner has given the security under ORS 517.810(3) and the operator is in default, the landowner shall be held responsible for complying with the operator's reclamation plan, with written notice from the department, thirty days to commence and a requirement to pursue it diligently, failing which the department claims the bond and may do the work itself and charge it.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at ORS 517.750(7), 517.790(1) and 517.860(4) on 2026-08-02. This is a terminology trap of exactly the kind that makes a reader draw the wrong conclusion from a correctly quoted statute, and it is Hawaii's problem inverted: there the statute uses an unfamiliar word, OCCUPIER, for the familiar person on top, and a reader notices they need to look it up. Here the statute uses the most familiar word there is for somebody else entirely, and a reader has no reason to check. Twenty-five occurrences of LANDOWNER in ORS 517 were inspected individually and none of them creates a right in the person who owns the surface. Be exact about 517.860(4), because overstating it would be its own error: it bites only where the landowner GAVE THE SECURITY under 517.810(3). A mineral owner who posted no bond is not made responsible for an operator's abandoned reclamation by that subsection. WHAT IS NOT READ: ORS 517.810(3) itself beyond its cross-reference, and whether the department has ever proceeded against a landowner under this route.

58 Pa.C.S. § 3215(a)

A Pennsylvania well may not be drilled within 200 feet, or 500 feet for an unconventional gas well, measured horizontally from the vertical well bore to a building or water well existing when the plat copy was mailed, without the written consent of that owner. An unconventional gas well may not be drilled within 1,000 feet of an existing water well, surface water intake, reservoir or other extraction point used by a water purveyor without that purveyor's written consent. Where consent is refused and the setback would deprive the oil and gas owner of the right to produce or share in production, the operator must be granted a variance on submitting a plan of additional measures.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at 58 Pa.C.S. section 3215(a) in the consolidated Title 58 PDF the General Assembly publishes, extracted with pdftotext. Pennsylvania's shape here is different from every other state on this record and the difference is worth stating plainly: this is a setback and permitting regime administered by the department, not a damages regime. Where Oklahoma, North Dakota, New Mexico and Montana all give the surface owner a statutory claim to be paid for what operations cost them, what was read here gives distance protections around buildings and water and a consent right that the operator can have overridden by variance. The mandatory word in the variance provision is worth noting: the operator SHALL be granted the variance where the setback would otherwise deprive the mineral owner of the right to produce, which resolves the conflict in the mineral owner's favour subject to conditions the department imposes, including insurance, bonding, indemnification and technical requirements. Whether Pennsylvania has any separate surface damages statute was NOT established and is named in the gaps.

Rhode Island General Laws, title index, enumerated to chapter level

This record found no Rhode Island statute governing mining, quarrying, or the extraction of sand, gravel or stone. All 2,781 chapter names of the General Laws were enumerated and none is named for any of those things. What that does NOT establish is that a Rhode Island quarry is unregulated. Three bodies of law were not read and any of them could reach one: municipal zoning and land use ordinances under title 45, which is where every other New England state on this record puts the primary control over digging; the environmental and freshwater wetlands provisions; and the soil erosion and sediment control provisions. Nothing on this page should be read as saying that a neighbour may excavate without a permit, and no negative about surface owner protection in Rhode Island is published here.

Checked August 3, 2026. Established on 2026-08-03 from the whole-of-code chapter enumeration only. Across 2,781 chapter names, MINING returns 0, QUARRY 0, MINERAL 0, EARTH 0, SAND 0 and GRAVEL 0; EXCAVAT returns 1 and it is a chapter about excavation near underground utility facilities, which is a damage-prevention statute rather than an extraction one. THIS IS DELIBERATELY PUBLISHED AT PARTIAL CONFIDENCE and it is worth saying why, because the rest of this page is not. Every other negative here rests on a chapter or a set of chapters read end to end; this one rests on an index. On the same day this record read Connecticut, where MINERAL returns 0 across 1,114 chapter names and 90 times inside one of them, so an index-only negative is exactly the shape of claim that has been wrong three times in this session. What can be said is that Rhode Island has no chapter whose name announces a mining or quarrying regime, which is itself informative in a state that does quarry: it means the control, if there is one, is municipal or environmental rather than a mining code. WHAT IS NOT READ AND SHOULD BE READ NEXT: title 45, Towns and Cities, particularly the zoning enabling provisions; the freshwater wetlands provisions; and the soil erosion and sediment control provisions. Until they are, this page says nothing about what a Rhode Island operator must do or what a neighbour may object to.

S.C. Code ch. 48-20, South Carolina Mining Act, section list

The South Carolina Mining Act runs to thirty-two sections and it is a permitting and reclamation statute rather than a code of rights between mineral owners and surface owners. It provides for certificates of exploration, general permits for limited mining, operating permits and their modification, reclamation plans and their modification, bonding or other security, fees and an annual operating fee with a late penalty, inspections and notices of deficiency with an administrative fee, notices of violation, hearings, suspension and revocation, bond forfeiture, appeals to the Mining Council and then to the courts, cease and desist orders, injunctions, and civil and criminal penalties. Three of its sections are about what it does not do, and they are the ones a landowner should know. It states its effect on local zoning regulations or ordinances. It provides that the chapter is not to restrict or impair any private right of action. And it provides that the chapter is not to impose liability on the State for damages.

Checked August 3, 2026. Established on 2026-08-03 by enumerating the section headings of S.C. Code title 48 chapter 20 in full: thirty-two sections, listed in the summary above, from the short title at 48-20-10 through the application of the chapter at 48-20-280 and the exceptions to civil penalties at 48-20-310. NO SECTION OF THE CHAPTER IS ABOUT COMPENSATION TO A SURFACE OWNER, about a damages standard, about notice to a landowner, or about consent, and the words surface owner do not appear in any heading. What the chapter gives a neighbour is the general permitting apparatus, and what it gives them at law is preserved rather than created: s. 48-20-260 says the chapter is not to restrict or impair a private right of action, which leaves the common law of nuisance, trespass and negligence where it found it. That is a materially different posture from Idaho's s. 47-334, read the same day, which sets a reasonable use standard and a six thousand dollar per well bond running to the surface landowner, and from Maryland's s. 14-111, which makes the driller's financial assurance extend to the surface AND SUBSURFACE owner. THE LIMIT AND IT IS A REAL ONE: this is a section-heading enumeration, and the text of the thirty-two sections was not read, so a compensation provision inside a section whose heading does not disclose it has not been excluded. The page says so rather than claiming a negative it has not earned.

SDCL 45-5A-2, Purpose of chapter

South Dakota's surface damages act opens by telling whoever applies it which way to lean. Its stated purpose is to provide the maximum amount of constitutionally permissible protection to surface owners from the undesirable effects of mineral development, and it directs that the chapter is to be interpreted to benefit surface owners regardless of when the mineral estate was separated from the surface estate. The findings behind it are agricultural: that the state's public welfare is largely dependent on agriculture, that mineral and oil and gas development may interfere with the use of the surface, and that surface owners should be justly compensated. On the substance, the mineral developer must pay the surface owner a sum equal to the damages sustained for loss of agricultural production, lost land value and lost value of improvements caused by mineral development. The amount may be fixed by any formula the two agree on, consideration is given to the period over which the loss occurs, and the surface owner may elect to be paid in annual instalments, except that harm from exploration is compensated by a single sum only. Payments cover only land directly affected, and payment for lost land value goes only to the title holder.

Checked August 4, 2026. Chapter 45-5A read end to end on 2026-08-04, all fifteen section numbers. The chapter dates to SL 1982, ch 304, and the definitions in 45-5A-3 tie mineral development to operations commenced subsequent to June 30, 1982.

SDCL 45-5A-4.1, Treble damages for failure to negotiate in good faith

Two separate penalties sit on top of the compensation. If a mineral developer fails or refuses to conduct good faith negotiations with the surface owner to determine damages, whether or not arising out of an existing contract or lease, the court in any subsequent litigation may at its discretion award treble damages on all or part of the surface owner's recovery. Separately, if the developer fails to give the notice the chapter requires before entering for exploration, the surface owner and the surface lessee may seek actual and punitive damages in court. The developer is also responsible for all damage to real or personal property resulting from a lack of ordinary care, and for all damage resulting from an interference caused by mineral development, which is a broader head than negligence alone. The surface owner has two years from when the injury becomes apparent, or should have become apparent to a reasonable person, to notify the developer in writing; the developer then has sixty days to make a written offer of settlement, and the surface owner sixty days to accept or reject it before suing. Nothing in the chapter precludes any other remedy allowed by law.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read at SDCL 45-5A-4.1, 45-5A-5.2, 45-5A-6, 45-5A-7, 45-5A-8, 45-5A-9 and 45-5A-10 on 2026-08-04. The treble damages section is recent, SL 2013, ch 225, and the punitive damages section is SL 2013, ch 226, amended SL 2014, ch 213. This is the opposite arrangement from Alabama, where the statutory remedies are declared the sole and exclusive remedies and punitive damages are excluded.

SDCL 45-5A-5, Notice to surface owner of proposed surface disturbing development activities

The chapter runs two notice periods keyed to how invasive the work is. For surface disturbing development activities, meaning well site construction, road building, grading, excavation, demolition and related work, the developer must give the surface owner written notice at least thirty days before operations commence, sent to the record surface owner at the address shown by the county register of deeds. That notice must disclose the plan of work and operations in enough detail for the surface owner to evaluate the effect on their use of the property, and it must include a form prepared by the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources advising the surface owner of their rights and options under the chapter. For activities that do not disturb the surface, such as surveying and well staking, seven days notice by registered mail or hand delivery is required, and it goes to the surface lessee as well as the owner, and must carry the developer's name, address and telephone number, an offer to discuss the exploration plan before operations begin, and a diagram of the approximate location of the proposed drilling site. Both notice regimes fall away if the developer and the surface owner or lessee already have a use agreement or contract covering the property.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read at SDCL 45-5A-5, 45-5A-5.1 and 45-5A-5.3 on 2026-08-04. The seven day exploration notice and the existing-agreement exception both date to SL 2013, ch 226. Note the two sections use different address sources: the thirty day notice goes to the address at the register of deeds, the seven day notice to the address shown by the county treasurer.

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.

Lightning Oil Co. v. Anadarko E&P Onshore, LLC, No. 15-0910 (Tex. May 19, 2017)

The Texas mineral estate is the dominant estate in the sense that the mineral owner may use as much of the surface as is reasonably necessary to produce and remove the minerals. Dominant does not mean superior: it means the mineral estate is the one that receives the benefit of an implied right to use the surface, and the rights it carries are not absolute.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the fetched Lightning Oil opinion, which cites Getty Oil Co. v. Jones, 470 S.W.2d 618, 621 (Tex. 1971) for this sentence and immediately adds that "The rights accruing to the dominant mineral estate are well established, but they are not absolute." The same opinion quotes Coyote Lake Ranch, LLC v. City of Lubbock, 498 S.W.3d 53, 63 (Tex. 2016) for it: "In the law of servitudes, the mineral estate is called 'dominant' and the surface estate 'servient', not because the mineral estate is in some sense superior, but because it receives the benefit of the implied right of use of the surface estate." Lightning Oil also observes that in many ways a surface owner's rights are more extensive than a mineral lessee's. The Coyote Lake and Getty Oil opinions were not themselves fetched, so both are recorded here as the fetched opinion prints them and neither is quoted beyond what it reproduces.

Merriman v. XTO Energy, Inc., No. 11-0494, 407 S.W.3d 244 (Tex. June 21, 2013)

Texas is where the accommodation doctrine comes from. To get relief for a failure to accommodate an existing surface use, the burden is on the surface owner, who must prove both that the lessee's use completely precludes or substantially impairs the existing use and that no reasonable alternative method is available to the surface owner for continuing it. Clearing that bar then requires proving there is a reasonable, customary and industry-accepted alternative available to the lessee.

Checked July 30, 2026. Full opinion read in the Supreme Court of Texas's own bound volume of its fiscal year 2013 opinions, published on the court's site; Merriman begins at page 655 of that volume and the opinion was delivered June 21, 2013 by Justice Johnson. The court gives the doctrine's origin in Texas by quoting Tarrant Cnty. Water Control & Improvement Dist. No. One v. Haupt, Inc., 854 S.W.2d 909, 911 (Tex. 1993): "The accommodation doctrine, also known as the 'alternative means' doctrine, was first articulated in Getty as a means to balance the rights of the surface owner and the mineral owner in the use of the surface". The second stage of the burden is at Haupt, 854 S.W.2d at 911-12: once the surface owner carries the first burden, he must further prove that in the particular circumstances there are alternative reasonable, customary and industry-accepted methods available to the lessee that would allow both recovery of the minerals and continuation of the existing use. Merriman himself lost on the second element. The Southwestern Reporter citation for Merriman, 407 S.W.3d 244, 248 (Tex. 2013), is printed inside the Lightning Oil opinion this site also fetched, which is why it is published here. The same page was independently fetched and read at caselaw.findlaw.com first and agreed with the official copy.

Merriman v. XTO Energy, Inc., No. 11-0494, 407 S.W.3d 244 (Tex. June 21, 2013)

Where the mineral owner or lessee has only one method of developing and producing the minerals, that method may be used even if it completely precludes or substantially impairs an existing use of the surface. The accommodation doctrine only bites where the lessee actually has a choice.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the same official bound volume, in the section the court heads "The Accommodation Doctrine", supported by Haupt, 854 S.W.2d at 911 and Getty Oil, 470 S.W.2d at 622 as printed. This is an express limit on the doctrine rather than a gloss on it: the court states it in the same passage as the accommodation rule and immediately before it, as the alternative case.

Merriman v. XTO Energy, Inc., No. 11-0494, 407 S.W.3d 244 (Tex. June 21, 2013)

A Texas surface owner does not meet the burden by showing that the alternative way of carrying on is merely more inconvenient or less profitable. The inconvenience or financial burden has to be so great as to make the alternative method unreasonable.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the same official bound volume. The court adds the positive form of the test in the next sentence: the surface owner "has the burden to prove that the inconvenience or financial burden of continuing the existing use by the alternative method is so great as to make the alternative method unreasonable". It supports both with Getty Oil, 470 S.W.2d at 628 (op. on reh'g), which it quotes as saying "We have not held, as some have stated, that the issue is a question of inconvenience to the surface owner.", and with Humble Oil & Refining Co. v. Williams, 420 S.W.2d 133, 135 (Tex. 1967). Those citations are printed in the opinion in the form given here.

Utah Code § 40-6-20

An owner or operator may enter surface land under which it holds rights to conduct oil and gas operations, and may use that surface land to the extent reasonably necessary to conduct those operations and consistent with allowing the surface land owner the greatest possible use of their property, so far as the surface owner's use does not interfere with the oil and gas operations. Except as is reasonably necessary to conduct the operations, the owner or operator must mitigate the effects of accessing the land, minimise interference with the surface owner's use, and compensate the surface land owner for unreasonable loss of crops, unreasonable loss of value to existing improvements owned by the surface owner, and unreasonable permanent damage to the surface land. The operator is not required to obtain location or spacing exceptions, or to use directional or horizontal drilling techniques that are not technologically feasible, economically practicable or reasonably available. Those requirements do not apply to the extent they conflict with or impair a contractual provision about the operator's use of the surface, and nothing in the section prevents a person seeking a remedy allowed by law or the parties addressing surface use through a lease, a surface use agreement or another written contract; where such an agreement exists it controls both the use of the land and the compensation for damage.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 40-6-20, enacted in 2012. Two things separate this from the other surface protection statutes on this record and both cut against the surface owner. The first is the word "unreasonable", which sits in front of every head of compensation: not loss of crops but UNREASONABLE loss of crops, not permanent damage but unreasonable permanent damage. Montana, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming all state their heads of damage without that qualifier, so in those states the argument is about how much and in Utah there is a prior argument about whether the loss was unreasonable at all. The second is subsection (4), which switches the whole compensation duty off to the extent it conflicts with a contractual provision, and subsection (5)(b), which says an agreement controls. So Utah's statutory floor is a default that a lease can displace, where Wyoming's bar on severing the right to damages and North Dakota's and West Virginia's bars on assigning it away run the other way. What the section does give, and states more plainly than most, is an accommodation standard: the greatest possible use of their property, which is a stronger formulation than the bare reasonable-and-necessary limit. WHAT IS NOT READ: what a Utah court has made of "unreasonable" here, and the notice provisions, if any, that sit around this section.

Utah Code § 40-6-21

A surface land owner and an owner or operator may request non binding mediation by written notice to the other party where they cannot agree on the amount of damages for unreasonable crop loss, unreasonable loss of value to existing improvements owned by the surface owner, or unreasonable permanent damage to the surface land, and where the dispute relates to an application for a permit to drill submitted to the division on or after July 1, 2012. The division and the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food must agree on and maintain a list of mediators qualified to mediate such disputes, and the parties may select a mediator from that list or from any other source. The surface land owner and the owner or operator share the cost of the mediator's services equally. The section does not prevent or delay an owner or operator from conducting oil and gas operations in accordance with applicable law.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 40-6-21. Set this against the other machinery on this record for the same disagreement and the differences are about who holds the leverage. Kentucky withholds the DRILLING PERMIT until a disagreement has been mediated, so the operator has a reason to settle. North Dakota shifts attorney's fees to an operator whose offer the surface owner beats in court, so the operator has a reason not to lowball. Oklahoma appoints appraisers. Utah offers non binding mediation from a maintained list of qualified mediators, at shared cost, and then says in the last subsection that none of it prevents or delays the operator from drilling. So the mediation runs alongside the work rather than in front of it. The maintained list is a genuinely useful thing that most of these regimes do not provide, and the fact that the Department of Agriculture and Food helps compile it tells you what kind of dispute the legislature had in mind. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether anything happens if a party refuses to mediate, and the section's interaction with the contractual override in the compensation section above.

10 V.S.A. § 6001, Act 250 definitions

Vermont has no mining permit chapter. What a commercial extraction project needs is an Act 250 land use permit, and whether it needs one turns on a test that has nothing to do with minerals. Development means, among other things, the construction of improvements on a tract or tracts of land owned or controlled by a person involving more than TEN acres within a five mile radius, for commercial or industrial purposes, in a municipality that has adopted permanent zoning and subdivision bylaws; or more than ONE acre on the same terms in a municipality that has not; or more than one acre in a municipality with bylaws that has elected by ordinance to have the one acre threshold apply. So the same quarry can be inside or outside Act 250 depending on the bylaws of the town it sits in. Two extraction activities are named as development in their own right regardless of acreage: the drilling of an oil and gas well, and exploration for fissionable source materials beyond the reconnaissance phase, or the extraction or processing of fissionable source material. Reconnaissance is defined, and the definition is the line between free and permitted: appraising a region from published literature, aerial photography and geologic maps; geophysical, geochemical and remote sensing techniques that do not involve road building, land clearing, explosives or introducing chemicals; surface geologic, topographic or other mapping and property surveying; and sample collections that do not involve excavation or drilling equipment, explosives or chemicals.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at 10 V.S.A. §§ 6001 and 6081 on 2026-08-03. The finding here is structural and it is the opposite of New Hampshire's, read the same week, which is worth stating because the two states are adjacent and their rock is the same. New Hampshire has a chapter called Local Regulation of Excavations that is ABOUT extraction, defines the material, and hands the permit to a town planning board. Vermont has no chapter about extraction at all, and instead runs quarrying through a general land use statute whose jurisdictional test is acreage and commercial purpose. Two consequences follow for a Vermont landowner and neither is obvious from the statute's own words. Whether the quarry next door needed a permit depends on whether that town adopted permanent zoning and subdivision bylaws, so the answer to a question about Vermont mineral law is a question about municipal law. And a project small enough to stay under the threshold is not regulated by this chapter at all. THE FISSIONABLE SOURCE MATERIAL PROVISIONS ARE UNUSUAL ENOUGH TO NAME. Vermont is the only state on this record whose land use statute defines reconnaissance, and it defines it in order to say precisely where a uranium or thorium prospector stops being free to look: reading maps, remote sensing and taking samples without excavation, explosives or chemicals are outside the permit, and anything beyond that is inside it. WHAT IS NOT READ, and it is the main gap on this topic: 10 V.S.A. § 6086, which sets out the ten criteria a district commission must find satisfied before issuing a permit, was NOT fetched. So this page says what triggers Act 250 and does not say what Act 250 then requires, and no negative about surface owner protection in Vermont should be inferred from that silence. Also not read: § 6085 on party status, so whether and how a neighbour participates is not established here; § 6084 on notice; and the whole of the appeals route.

10 V.S.A. § 6081, Permits required; exemptions

Vermont defines a slate quarry as a quarry pit or hole from which slate has been extracted or removed for the purpose of commercial production of building material, roofing, tile or other dimensional stone products, and defines dimensional stone as slate processed into regularly shaped blocks according to specifications. Pits from which slate is extracted primarily for crushed stone products are outside the definition unless slate had been extracted from them primarily for dimensional purposes as of 1 June 1970. For slate removed from a site before 1 June 1970 and included in final slate quarry registration documents, the site, if lying unused at any time after those operations commenced, is deemed to be held in reserve and is not deemed to be abandoned. The registration window has closed: by no later than 1 January 1997, an owner of land or of MINERAL RIGHTS, or an owner of slate quarry leasehold rights, on a parcel where a slate quarry was located as of 1 June 1970, could register the quarry with the district commission and with the clerk of the municipality, with a map of the parcel boundaries. The registration had to state the name and address of the owner of the land, mineral rights or leasehold rights, whether that person held mineral rights or leasehold rights or owned in fee simple, the physical location, the location and size of ancillary buildings, and the book and page of the recorded instrument by which the owner holds title. The registration went to the district commission with a request for a final jurisdictional determination, and that determination is recorded in the municipal land records at the registrant's expense with a site plan. On a registered parcel, ancillary activities related to extracting and processing slate into products other than crushed stone are not substantial changes so long as they do not create a new slate quarry hole unrelated to an existing one. Ancillary activities are listed: drilling, crushing, grinding, sizing, washing, drying, sawing and cutting stone; blasting, trimming, punching, splitting and gauging; and the use of buildings and the use and construction of equipment exclusively for those activities, with buildings existing on 1 April 1995 and their replacements treated as ancillary.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at 10 V.S.A. § 6081(j) to (l) with the definitions at § 6001(25) on 2026-08-03. THIS IS THE ONLY PROVISION ON THIS RECORD THAT LEGISLATES NON USE IN THE OWNER'S FAVOUR, and it is in the same state as 29 V.S.A. § 563, which abandons an oil and gas interest for ten years of non use. Vermont says in terms that an idle slate quarry is held in reserve and says in terms that an idle oil and gas interest is abandoned. The two provisions do different legal work, and the page is careful about that: § 563 is about TITLE and takes the interest away, while § 6081(j) is about PERMIT JURISDICTION and preserves a pre-Act 250 exemption. But the choice of the word abandoned in both, in the same state's statutes, is the sharpest illustration this record has of a legislature deciding that non use means opposite things depending on what is being left idle. Set it beside New Hampshire, read the same week, which defines dimension stone in order to put it OUTSIDE its excavation permit regime and its two cent per cubic yard tax. Two adjacent states, the same rock, opposite drafting: New Hampshire's granite is excluded from the regime by definition, and Vermont's slate is brought into the definitions in order to be given a permanent exemption from a permit. THE WINDOW IS CLOSED and that is the second thing to notice. Registration had to be done by 1 January 1997. This record now carries two states with closed statutory windows, and they cut opposite ways: North Carolina's windows, the last of which shut on 1 January 1988, were the last chance to SAVE a mineral interest, and missing one lost it. Vermont's was the last chance to register an EXEMPTION, and missing it means the quarry is subject to Act 250 like anything else rather than that anybody lost title to anything. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether any list of registered slate quarries is published anywhere, how many were registered, and § 6007(c), the jurisdictional determination provision the registration runs through. No Vermont decision on these subsections was fetched.

29 V.S.A. § 571, Hydraulic fracturing; prohibition

No person may engage in hydraulic fracturing in the State, and no person within the State may collect, store or treat wastewater from hydraulic fracturing. The prohibition was added in 2012 and has no permit exception and no moratorium language. Separately, and eleven years later, the whole of Vermont's oil and gas conservation code was repealed: 29 V.S.A. chapter 14 had six subchapters, headed General Provisions, Administration, Conservation of Oil and Gas, State Oil and Gas Leases, Permits Reports and Notices, and Violations Enforcement and Penalties, and every section in all six was repealed on 8 June 2023. The earlier chapter 13, Natural Gas and Oil Resources, was repealed in 1982. What remains in chapter 14 is three sections, and two of them were put back in 2024: a requirement that a lessee file a release of an expired, cancelled, surrendered or relinquished oil and gas lease within thirty days of a written request, on pain of all damages occasioned including costs and reasonable attorney's fees; the abandonment section dealt with elsewhere on this page; and the fracking prohibition.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at 29 V.S.A. §§ 571 and 561 and the chapter 14 table of contents on 2026-08-03. The prohibition was added by 2011, No. 152 (Adj. Sess.), § 3, effective 16 May 2012, and amended by 2023, No. 53, § 135. THIS IS THE THIRD OUTRIGHT STATUTORY BAN ON THIS RECORD AND THE EARLIEST OF THE THREE: Vermont 2012, Maryland 2017, Washington 2019, with New York achieving a similar result by a different instrument, a refusal of permits for high volume hydraulic fracturing rather than a prohibition on the activity. Vermont's is also the only one of the three that reaches the WASTEWATER as well as the technique, so a Vermont facility may not take fracking wastewater produced in another state. TWO DATES TELL THE STORY AND THEY SHOULD BE READ TOGETHER. Vermont prohibited the technique in 2012, dismantled the entire conservation, leasing, permitting and enforcement apparatus for oil and gas in 2023, and then in 2024 enacted a statute that abandons an unused oil and gas interest to the surface owner and another that forces a lessee to release a dead lease. A legislature that has closed the industry down is still legislating about the title to its interests, and the 2024 additions are the tidying up of an ownership record for an industry that will not return. That reading is this record's, drawn from the dates and the section headings, and no legislative history was fetched. WHAT IS NOT READ, AND IT IS A REAL LIMIT: the TEXT of the repealed subchapters. Only the six subchapter headings were read, so what Vermont's conservation code actually contained before 2023, including whether it had compulsory pooling, spacing units, correlative rights or a royalty floor, is not known to this record. Nothing on this page should be read as establishing what Vermont gave up. Also not read: whether any well was ever drilled in Vermont, and whether any Natural Gas and Oil Resources Board still exists.

Va. Code § 45.2-1632

Within one day of filing an application for a permit for a gas or oil operation, the applicant must give notice of it to every surface owner, coal owner and mineral owner on the tract to be drilled; every coal operator with a registered operation plan there; every surface owner on a tract where the surface is to be disturbed; every gas, oil or royalty owner within half the statutory well spacing distance or half the distance to the nearest well in the same pool, whichever is less, or inside an established drilling unit; every coal operator holding or applying for a mining or prospecting permit within 500 feet of the proposed well, or 750 feet for a coalbed methane well; every coal or mineral owner on a tract within those same distances; and every certificated gas storage field operator whose area includes the well or whose boundary is within 1,250 feet of it. The notice must state the time within which objections may be made and where to send them. Within seven days the applicant must also notify the local governing body and publish notice in a newspaper of general circulation. An applicant must make a reasonable effort, and where a person cannot be identified or located the published notice is sufficient as to them.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 45.2-1632. Two things distinguish this from the notice statutes on this record in Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Kentucky. It is measured in one day from the filing rather than in days before entry, so the surface owner learns of the application at the same time as the regulator rather than shortly before a rig arrives. And the notice list is not just the surface owner: it runs to coal owners, mineral owners, coal operators, nearby royalty owners and gas storage operators, which is a map of everyone Virginia thinks has a stake in a well, and the same list then defines who has standing to object. The distances are worth keeping, because they are the operative numbers: 500 feet for a conventional well and 750 for a coalbed methane well as to coal interests, and 1,250 feet as to a certificated storage field. WHAT IS NOT READ: section 45.2-1616 on statewide spacing, which supplies the distance the royalty owner notice radius is derived from.

Va. Code § 45.2-1637

Objections to a new permit or a permit modification must be filed within 15 days of receiving the notice and must state their reasons. The only objections a surface owner may raise are that the operations plan for soil erosion and sediment control is inadequate or ineffective; that measures beyond the well's water-protection string are needed to protect freshwater-bearing strata; that the permitted work will be a hazard to anyone's safety; that the location of a coalbed methane well or its pipeline will unreasonably infringe on the surface owner's use of the surface, so long as a reasonable alternative site is available within the unit and granting the objection will not materially impair a right in a valid agreement between the surface owner and the operator or their predecessors; and the same infringement objection where the surface owner is an interstate park commission. A royalty owner's objections are confined to three grounds of their own, and coal owners, mineral owners and gas storage operators each have their own limited list.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 45.2-1637. The fourth ground is a statutory accommodation doctrine, and comparing it with the case-law version is the point of putting it here. Texas asks whether the surface owner has a reasonable alternative use of the SURFACE and leaves the burden on the surface owner throughout. Virginia asks whether there is a reasonable alternative SITE for the well within the unit, which puts the alternative on the operator's side of the ledger, and it is decided by the Director on a permit objection within fifteen days rather than by a lawsuit. What narrows it sharply is that it applies only to a coalbed methane well or its pipeline. For a conventional gas or oil well a Virginia surface owner has no objection about their own use of the land at all: the other three grounds are about erosion, groundwater and safety. And an existing agreement between the surface owner and the operator can defeat the objection.

Va. Code § 45.2-1649

Where a surface owner takes all or part of their domestic water from a water well and that supply has been materially affected by contamination, or by partial or complete interruption, proximately resulting from a gas well operation within 1,320 feet of the water well, the operator must promptly provide a replacement supply capable of meeting the uses the old one met. The operator may enter the surface land at reasonable times and in a reasonable manner to sample any water well within 1,320 feet of a proposed or existing gas well that the surface owner or occupant is actually using for domestic purposes. If the surface owner or occupant refuses to allow the sampling, or causes the operator to be prevented from sampling, the operator must promptly notify the Department, which keeps a record of such notifications, and the surface owner is then not entitled to the replacement remedy.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 45.2-1649 and 45.2-1648, which have to be read together because the second one can take the first one away. The pair is a bargain the statute makes explicit: the operator gets a right to establish the baseline by sampling your well, and if you refuse the sample you lose the replacement remedy. No other water supply provision on this record does that. Compare Kentucky, whose duty is wider in every direction that matters to who is protected, running to any owner of an interest in real property, to agricultural and industrial as well as domestic use, and to any source rather than a well, with no distance limit at all. Virginia is narrower and more definite: a surface owner, domestic use, a water well, 1,320 feet, and a duty to provide a replacement promptly. Neither statute says who decides whether the disruption was proximately caused. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether the 1,320 feet creates a presumption of causation or only a boundary on the duty, and any Virginia decision applying either section.

RCW 78.52.120, Drilling permit required, notice

Washington gives the surface owner a voice in the permit rather than a claim for money. Anyone proposing to drill for oil or gas must apply to the Department of Natural Resources and pay a fee set by the well's estimated depth, from two hundred and fifty dollars for a well of three thousand five hundred feet or less up to one thousand dollars past twelve thousand feet. At the same time as the application is filed, the applicant must give a copy of it to the surface landowner, the landowner's tenant and other surface users. Each of them then has fifteen days to inform the department of objections or comments about the proposed use of the surface, and the department must consider what they say. The permit issues only if the drilling is consistent with the chapter and not detrimental to the public interest, and the applicant must show a prima facie ownership or contractual right to drill.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at RCW 78.52.120 on 2026-08-01, in full. Three things about the shape of this right are worth being precise on, because it is easy to read it as more than it is. It reaches the tenant and other surface users and not only the owner, which is broader than most notice provisions. It is concurrent with the filing rather than before it, so the surface owner learns of the proposal at the same moment the regulator does and not sooner. And the department's duty is to consider, not to refuse: nothing in the section lets an objection defeat a permit. What the section gives is standing in the process.

RCW 78.52.560, Hydraulic fracturing prohibited for the exploration and production of oil and natural gas

Washington's oil and gas chapter gives the surface owner notice and a hearing and nothing else. There is no surface damage compensation section, no requirement of a surface use agreement, and no bond posted for the surface owner's benefit; the bonds the chapter and the regulator require run to the state, for plugging and reclamation. Set against that, Washington has removed the technique most surface owners are worried about. Since 2019 the use of hydraulic fracturing in the exploration for and production of oil and natural gas has been prohibited outright, with the statute defining the term for itself and preserving hydraulic fracturing for other purposes.

Checked August 1, 2026. The prohibition was read at RCW 78.52.560 on 2026-08-01 and is 2019 c 294 s 1. The negative half of this rule was established by enumeration and not by a search, which matters because the Legislature's full-text search returns a Page not found shell to a plain fetch and could not be validated against a control phrase. The complete table of contents of chapter 78.52, all fifty-nine sections, was read: there is no section on surface damages, surface use agreements or a surface owner bond. What that enumeration cannot exclude is a duty living in another title or in a Washington decision, and neither was searched, so this is a negative about chapter 78.52 rather than about Washington law entire.

RCW 79.14.040, Compensation to owners of private rights and to state for surface damage

Where the minerals being leased are the state's, the entry condition is real money rather than notice. No lessee may commence any operation on the leased land until it has provided for compensation to the owners of private rights in that land according to law, or instead filed a surety bond with the department in an amount the commissioner thinks sufficient to cover that compensation until the amount is settled by agreement, arbitration or judicial decision. The lessee must also provide for compensation to the state itself for damage to the state's surface rights, under the department's rules.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at RCW 79.14.040 on 2026-08-01. The reason this sits beside the notice rule rather than replacing it is that the two cover different land. RCW 78.52.120 governs any oil or gas well in Washington whoever owns the minerals; this section governs leases of the state's own mineral, coal, oil and gas rights, which is the estate RCW 79.11.210 reserved. So which protection a surface owner has turns on who owns the minerals under them, and the stronger one attaches to the state's minerals. RCW 79.14.340 provides for compensation for loss or damage to surface rights on prospecting and mining contracts and was seen on the chapter's table of sections but was not read.

W. Va. Code § 22-7-3

A West Virginia oil and gas developer must compensate the surface owner for lost income or expenses from land occupied or made inaccessible by the operation, the market value of crops destroyed or prevented from reaching market, any damage to a water supply in use before the permitted activity, the cost of repairing personal property up to replacement by property of like age and quality, and any diminution in value of the surface lands judged by the use actually made of them beforehand. Reserving or assigning that compensation apart from the surface estate is prohibited except to a tenant.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 22-7-3, the Oil and Gas Production Damages Compensation article. Two of the five heads are unusual on this record. Damage to a water supply in use before the operation began is compensable in its own right rather than as part of a general diminution claim, which matters in a state where a great many households are on wells. And the cost of repairing personal property is recoverable up to the value of replacement by property of like age, wear and quality, which is a measure other states here do not spell out. The prohibition quoted above is the same idea Montana enacts: the entitlement to be paid for surface damage is welded to the surface estate and cannot be severed and sold the way the minerals were. Subsection (c) deals with co-owned surface: a claim is for the benefit of all the co-owners, and resolving it bars further claims arising out of the same drilling operations. What was NOT read is the rest of the article, including the definitions in 22-7-2, how a claim is brought and what happens if the parties do not agree.

Wis. Stat. s. 293.65, Withdrawal of surface waters; withdrawal of groundwater; damage claims

Wisconsin's protection for a landowner over a mine is built around water rather than around the surface generally, and it starts before anything is proved. A person claiming damage to the quantity or quality of their private water supply caused by prospecting or mining files a complaint with the department and, where an immediate alternative source is needed, with their town, village or city. The municipality must on request supply the water to replace what the damaged supply used to provide, and that duty begins the moment the complaint is filed and lasts until the department's decision is carried out. The department investigates and holds a hearing. If it concludes that prospecting or mining is the principal cause, it orders the operator to provide water of like quantity and quality for as long as the supply would have gone on being useful, to reimburse the municipality, and to pay compensation for damages unreasonably inflicted, up to a capped amount per claimant that is adjusted every year. If it concludes mining was not the cause, the person who complained reimburses the municipality.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Wis. Stat. s. 293.65(4) on 2026-08-01, paragraphs (b) to (g), with sub. (3)(b) on the groundwater approval standard. Three details worth keeping. The department must issue written findings and its order within sixty days of the close of the hearing, and the operator must keep providing water pending any appeal. The cap the statute prints is $75,000 per claimant in full compensatory damages, but the section directs that the figure be changed annually by the method in s. 70.375(6), and THE CURRENT ADJUSTED FIGURE WAS NOT READ, so the printed number is a floor of unknown age rather than today's cap. And the statute says the remedy is not a bar to any other statutory or common law remedy, so this sits on top of whatever else an owner has rather than replacing it.

Wis. Stat. s. 293.11, Mine effect responsibility

Wisconsin puts responsibility for what a mine does to its surroundings in one place. The Department of Natural Resources serves as the central unit of state government to ensure that the air, lands, waters, plants, fish and wildlife affected by prospecting or mining receive the greatest practicable degree of protection and reclamation. Occupational health and safety in mining stays exclusively with the Department of Safety and Professional Services, and the powers of the geological and natural history survey stay with the survey, with all three free to cooperate.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Wis. Stat. s. 293.11 on 2026-08-01. The section's own annotation in the Legislature's database records that it is a statement of purpose and does not grant authority to issue a ban on mining activity, citing a 1996 Court of Appeals decision. That annotation is noted because it limits how far the sentence can be read, and it is not published as a holding here: no opinion was fetched. For a landowner the practical value of the section is knowing which agency to write to, which is not obvious in a state where the same department also runs hunting, fishing and parks.

Wyo. Stat. § 30-5-402

An oil and gas operator with the right to the oil or gas under the surface may locate and enter the land for all purposes reasonable and necessary to conduct operations, but must first comply with the Act and must reasonably accommodate existing surface uses. Entry for oil and gas operations is conditioned on the operator giving the required notice, attempting good faith negotiations, and doing one of four things: securing the surface owner's written consent or waiver; obtaining an executed surface use agreement providing compensation for damages to land and improvements; securing a statutory waiver; or, in lieu of consent or an agreement, executing a good and sufficient surety bond or other guaranty to the commission for the surface owner's benefit to secure payment of damages. Before entering for non-surface-disturbing activities such as inspections, staking, surveys, measurements and general evaluation of routes and sites, the operator must give at least five days notice, and notice again before any later such entry not previously discussed. Written notice of the proposed operations must be given to all surface owners at the address shown by the county records, no more than one hundred and eighty and no fewer than thirty days before operations commence, disclosing the plan of work well enough for the surface owner to evaluate its effect, including the proposed commencement dates and, so far as reasonably known, the locations of roads, wells, well pads, seismic locations, pits, reservoirs, power lines, pipelines, compressor pads and tank batteries.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 30-5-402 in the complete-title PDF the Wyoming Legislature publishes for Title 30, extracted with pdftotext -layout. The word that carries this rule is "conditioned", and it is worth setting against the other states here rather than declaring it unique, because one of them is closer than it looks. New Mexico requires thirty days notice, a copy of the Act and a proposed agreement, and then the operator may proceed. Kentucky withholds the drilling PERMIT until a disagreement has been mediated, which bites on the regulator's timetable rather than on entry. Colorado is the near neighbour: its commission's 700 Series rules say that where a surface owner is not party to a lease or surface use agreement the operator must post financial assurance with the commission before commencing operations with heavy equipment, which is the same agreement-or-bond structure. Three things separate Wyoming's. It is in the statute rather than in a commission rule. The gate is entry upon the land itself, not the arrival of heavy equipment. And the statute puts notice and an attempt at good faith negotiations on the same footing as the four alternatives, so an operator that skipped the negotiation has not satisfied the section by bonding. Note what the bond option means in practice: an operator who cannot reach agreement can still enter, so this is not a surface owner's veto, and an owner who refuses everything ends up holding security rather than silence. Two further provisions are worth separating. The duty to "reasonably accommodate existing surface uses" is an accommodation standard stated in statute rather than left to case law, which puts Wyoming with Colorado and Kentucky and against Texas. And the notice window has a ceiling as well as a floor, no more than one hundred and eighty days, the same pair of bounds Montana sets at one hundred and eighty and twenty, so a notice cannot be served years ahead and left to go stale. WHAT IS NOT READ: section 30-5-404 on how the bond amount is set and how objections to it are heard.

Wyo. Stat. § 30-5-405

The operator must pay the surface owner a sum of money or other compensation equal to the damages sustained for loss of production and income, loss of land value and loss of value of improvements caused by oil and gas operations. The amount and the method of compensation may be determined in any manner the parties agree, and in determining damages consideration must be given to the period over which the loss occurs. The payments cover only land directly affected by the operations, and the right to receive surface damage payments may not be severed from the land surface. An operator who fails to pay an instalment under an annual damage agreement on time is liable to the surface owner for twice the unpaid instalment if it is not paid within sixty days of receiving notice of the failure. Where operations have begun without any agreement on compensation, the surface owner must give written notice of the damages to the operator and to the commission within two years after the damage was discovered or should have been discovered with due diligence; the operator then has sixty days to make a written offer of settlement; and if the surface owner gets no reply, or a rejection or counter offer, or rejects an offer, they may sue for compensation in the district court of the county where the damage was sustained.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 30-5-405 and 30-5-406. Three features are worth holding against the other damages regimes here. The heads of damage include loss of production and INCOME, which reaches a farming or grazing operation's revenue rather than only the value of the ground. The doubling provision for a late instalment is not Wyoming's alone: Montana's section 82-10-504 carries the same penalty on the same sixty day trigger, in nearly the same words, and the pair of them is worth noticing because it is the only remedy on this record aimed at an operator who agreed to pay and then did not. North Dakota shifts attorney's fees to an owner who beats the offer in court, which is a different lever aimed at a different failure. And the quoted sentence solves a problem the rest of this site is about: the right to be paid for surface damage cannot itself be severed and sold the way the minerals were, so it stays with whoever owns the surface. Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia each have a version of that, all three phrased as a bar on reserving or assigning the compensation apart from the surface estate except to a tenant; Wyoming's is the flattest statement of it and the only one with no tenant exception on its face. Note the two year clock in section 30-5-406 runs from discovery rather than from the operations, and that it is a notice deadline and not the limitation period, which is at section 30-5-409 and was not read.

43 U.S.C. § 299

Every patent issued under the Stock-Raising Homestead Act reserved all coal and other minerals to the United States, so a surface owner can hold clean title to the land and own none of what is beneath it.

Checked July 29, 2026. Section read in full at uscode.house.gov, which stamps the text as containing those laws in effect on July 28, 2026. This is the reason a county records search can come back clean and still miss the reservation: it happened in the federal patent that first put the land into private hands, not in any later county instrument. The same subsection sets what a mineral developer must do before using the surface, which is recorded as a separate rule on this record.