Property Law and Real Estate Commons^™

Utah, Mark Burghardt

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Oil and gas production continues to be an important sector of Utah’s economy. Following a 25% loss in production between 2014 and 2015, Utah’s production continues to slowly rebound. Crude oil production in 2019 appears to be slightly ahead of 2018 production. Monthly production averages slightly over three million barrels, placing Utah among the top ten states in crude oil production. Along with the continuing increase in production, the state’s legal framework governing oil and gas continues to develop.

This Article examines recent changes in Utah statutes and regulations along with new case law developments involving the oil and gas …

Survey Of Selected 2019 Texas Oil And Gas Cases And Statutes, William D. Farrar

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Texas courts and the legislature were quite active in 2019 concerning oil and gas issues. Texas courts decided many cases involving everything from deed interpretation to lease repudiation to farmout interpretation. The Texas Supreme Court has granted several petitions for review from the courts of appeal. The legislature enacted or amended statutes concerning so called “royalty leases,” the Mineral Interest Pooling Act, and others. The following are summaries of some selected cases and statutes that will be of interest to those involved with Texas oil and gas law.

North Carolina's Dueling Property Rights Interests: Water And Hydraulic Fracturing, Rupa Russe

NCCU Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Cities And Citizens Seethe: A Case Study Of Local Efforts To Influence Natural Gas Pipeline Routing Decisions, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article explores the reasons local governments find difficulty influencing pipeline-routing decisions. For example, federal law controls interstate natural gas pipeline permitting, which is complicated and inaccessible. State law, particularly in Ohio, heavily favors utilities, in part by preempting local efforts to make local decisions regarding oil and gas development. Finally, the information gaps are enormous between what local governments need to influence pipeline-routing decisions and what is accessible.

This Article addresses barriers to local influence by discussing the efforts of citizens and local governments to influence the routing of NexusSpectra's natural gas transmission pipeline, which was recently constructed and …

Getting Past Possession: Subsurface Property Disputes As Nuisances, Joseph A. Schremmer

Washington Law Review

Property rights in the subsurface of land are adapting to accommodate modern activities like massive hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Property rights will need to continue adapting if they are going to accommodate other developing activities like large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS). Courts and commentators rarely approach the nature of subsurface property directly. They tend instead to discuss appropriate standards for tort liability when disputes arise—for example when artificial fissures from a frac treatment extend into and drain oil or gas from a neighbor’s land. The case law and literature generally approach unauthorized subterranean invasions as trespasses. Because the tort of …

Getting Past Possession: Subsurface Property Disputes As Nuisances, Joseph A. Schremmer

Faculty Scholarship

Property rights in the subsurface of land are adapting to accommodate modern activities like massive hydraulic fracturing (fracing). Property rights will need to continue adapting if they are to accommodate other developing activities like large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS). Courts and commentators rarely approach the nature of subsurface property directly. They tend instead to discuss appropriate standards for tort liability when disputes arise—for example when artificial fissures from a frac treatment extend into and drain oil or gas from a neighbor’s land. The case law and literature generally approach unauthorized subterranean invasions as trespasses. Because the tort of trespass …

New Challenges To Transboundary Unitization In The Gulf Of Mexico, Isaac Olson

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

In the last two decades, the search for untapped oil reserves led to many innovations in oil and gas exploration. As new technology continues to open new horizons, oil companies are increasingly able to drill at deeper ocean depths to tap offshore reserves. Offshore drilling poses problems where oil reserves hundreds of miles from shore cross an international boundary line. While American courts typically apply the rule of capture to determine who owns the subsoil resources, international law requires countries to work together to maximize the efficient, safe extraction of the resources. In 2012, the United States and Mexico drafted …

Public Rights After Oil States Energy, Adam J. Macleod

Scholarly Articles

The concept of public rights plays an important role in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of the United States. But as the decision in Oil States last Term revealed, the Court has often used the term to refer to three different concepts with different jurisprudential implications. Using insights drawn from historical and analytical jurisprudence, this Article distinguishes the three concepts and examines how each of them is at work in patent law. A precise reading of Oil States also bears lessons for other areas of law that implicate both private rights and duties and the administration of public, regulatory …

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

Virginia, Mason Heidt

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article addresses developments in Virginia oil and gas law for the period from July 31, 2014 to July 31, 2019. This period is longer than normally addressed by this journal to capture important developments in the law between this update and the last Virginia update published in 2015. At the state level, in Swords Creek Land Partnership v. Belcher, the Supreme Court of Virginia concluded coalbed methane (“CBM”) is a separate and distinct mineral estate from coal. It held that the meaning of “coal” within an 1887 severance deed was unambiguous and did not intend to convey ownership rights …

Wyoming, Walter F. Eggers, Iii

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Wyoming currently ranks eighth nationally in both crude oil and natural gas production. In 2018, Wyoming produced 87.9 million barrels of crude oil, up from 75.7 million barrels in 2017. Wyoming produced 1.81 billion MCF (thousand cubic feet) of natural gas, increasing from 1.80 billion MCF produced in 2017.

A Comparative Analysis Of Texas And New Mexico Oil And Gas Laws From A Title Examiner's Perspective, Carly Hewett

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

The statutory framework surrounding oil and gas law and the related title issues in Texas and New Mexico, while similar in many instances, do have some notable differences. New Mexico case law is very limited, which could be due to a variety of reasons, including a smaller state population and the fact that New Mexico and the United States own much of New Mexico’s oil and gas productive acreage. Therefore, practitioners often look to other jurisdictions, including Texas, for guidance. Texas’s secondary authority is also better developed with its own adopted title standards. New Mexico does not have such guidance. …

Come And Charge It: The Rise Of Utility-Scale Battery Energy Storage In Texas, Matthew A. Arth

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Affordable, reliable battery energy storage has long been the holy grail of the electric grid. From avoiding expensive transmission build-out to smoothing out fluctuations inherent to wind and solar resource output, batteries hold the promise of providing the solution to an ever more intermittent and distributed grid. Across the United States and particularly in Texas, that futuristic vision is beginning to approach reality as battery costs decline and favorable regulatory policy is implemented. This Article addresses the current state of battery energy storage system development and notes recent contributory policy developments at both the national and state level.

The Fight For Footprint: Energy Development And Competing Surface Use Issues, James D. Bradbury

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

The laws surrounding energy development in Texas have evolved over the past century, as Texas has been at the epicenter of the energy industry—and thereby, the center of energy law—since oil was discovered in Corsicana in 1894. Domestic, and even some international choice-of-law clauses, choose Texas law due to the Lone Star State’s dominance in the energy sector.

While Texas is often closely tied to oil and gas, its strong position in the energy market is not limited just to this industry. Texas is now the largest producer of wind energy and the seventh largest producer of solar energy in …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Oil & Gas Survey: West Virginia, Josh Fershee

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article summarizes and discusses important recent developments in West Virginia’s oil and gas law as determined by recent West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals cases. There were no substantial legislative changes in the current period.

Experience Is A Dear Teacher--The Texas Wind Decommissioning Statute, Rod Wetsel

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

As is well known among both my students and colleagues, my professional life as a lawyer (and later as a law professor) took a monumental turn in 1999 when I reviewed and drafted my first wind lease in Nolan County, Texas. That lease, as well as all of the other wind leases at the time, contained contractional “clean up and restoration” clauses similar to many oil and gas leases then in use. Simply put, the leases provided that upon expiration or termination of the lease (which for a wind lease, unlike an oil and gas lease, might be fifty or …

Getting Past Possession: Subsurface Property Disputes As Nuisances, Joseph Schremmer

Faculty Articles

Property rights in the subsurface of land are adapting to accommodate modern activities like massive hydraulic fracturing (fracing). Property rights will need to continue adapting if they are to accommodate other developing activities like large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS). Courts and commentators rarely approach the nature of subsurface property directly. They tend instead to discuss appropriate standards for tort liability when disputes arise — for example when artificial fissures from a frac treatment extend into and drain oil or gas from a neighbor’s land. The case law and literature generally approach unauthorized subterranean invasions as trespasses. Because the tort …

Virginia Uranium, Inc. V. Warren, Nyles G. Greer

Public Land & Resources Law Review

The Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled that the Atomic Energy Act did not preempt a Virginia law prohibiting uranium mining in the Commonwealth. The Court held that although the Act delegated substantial power over the nuclear life cycle to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it offered no indication that Congress sought to strip states of their traditional power to regulate mining on private lands within their borders.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Co-Tenancy Act And The Modernization Of West Virginia’S Oil And Gas Law, Jack Budig

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Georgist Perspective Of Petroleum Taxation, Joseph Leeson

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Over a century ago, the town of Arden, Delaware, was founded on a unique single-tax-community system that radically altered the popular concept of land ownership. This system was premised on concepts developed by a man few know today but who was a major figure in economics during the 1800s, Henry George. George's public finance theory has been described as having received "intermittent attention over the years, with many eminent names in economics making at least a passing comment, but it has seen comparably little action in the policy debate arena and has been largely ignored by the modern era of …

This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is Mined Land: Expanding Governmental Ownership Liability Under Cercla, Kiersten E. Holms

Washington and Lee Law Review

Part II of this Note begins by providing a brief overview of the background and goals of CERCLA. Part II also provides an examination of the issue of ownership liability under CERCLA and recounts the federal courts’ difficulty in applying ownership liability. Part II then describes how the federal government’s “bare legal title” argument arose out of the confusion surrounding ownership liability in CERCLA litigation. Part III moves on to examine the recent trend in CERCLA litigation rejecting the federal government’s bare legal title argument, thus holding the federal government liable as an owner based on its possession of legal …

Maralex Resources, Inc. V. Barnhardt, Bradley E. Tinker

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In Maralex Resources v. Barnhardt, Maralex and property owners brought an action to protect private property from BLM inspections of oil and gas lease sites. The Tenth Circuit looked at the plain meaning of a congressional statute and held in favor of Maralex, finding that BLM lacked authority to require a private landowner to provide BLM with a key to inspect wells of their property. The Tenth Circuit held BLM has the authority to conduct inspections without prior notice on private property lease sites; however, it is required to contact the property owner for permission before entering the property.

Venezuela Undermines Gold Miner Crystallex's Attempts To Recover On Its Icsid Award, Sam Wesson

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Get Out From Under My Land! Hydraulic Fracturing, Forced Pooling Or Unitization, And The Role Of The Dissenting Landowner, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article addresses the legal circumstances arising when a state agency authorizes oil and gas production operations beneath a landowner’s land against that landowner’s wishes. One might assume that, if a landowner wants to preserve his or her land from oil and gas development, the landowner could simply refuse to allow drilling to occur beneath the land. However, neighbors may want to develop the oil and gas resources beneath their own land. To satisfy the neighbors’ wishes, an oil and gas producer must assemble mineral production rights on or beneath enough contiguous land to satisfy state spacing and acreage requirements …

Take This Job And Shove It: The Pragmatic Philosophy Of Johnny Paycheck And A Prayer For Strict Liability In Appalachia, Eugene "Trey" Moore Iii

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming

Asarco Llc V. Atlantic Richfield Company, Ryan L. Hickey

Public Land & Resources Law Review

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liabiltiy Act, commonly known as CERCLA, facilitates cleanup of hazardous waste sites and those contaminated by other harmful substances by empowering the Environmental Protection Agency to identify responsible parties and require them to undertake or fund remediation. Because pollution sometimes occurrs over long periods of time by multiple parties, CERCLA also enables polluters to seek financial contribution from other contaminators of a particular site. The Ninth Circuit clarified the particuar circumstances under which contribution actions may arise in Asarco LLC v. Atlantic Richfield Co., holding non-CERCLA settlements may give rise to CERCLA contribution …