Gas industry legal fieldwork
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Basic title searching
Minerals, oil, gas, coal and other rights first began being separated in Pennsylvania sometime after the civil war. The term minerals does not include oil, coal and gas.
You conduct your title search in the court house deed room:
- Start with your title and look at the previous owner and just keep going backwards until hit about 100 years.
- start with the current deed reference and trace it back
- each deed references the previous deed by book and page number
- be sure to search back alot more than fifty years
- read each deed carefully and pay particular attention to reservations
- the oil/gas rights may have been split off as a seperate deed and sold without creating a new deed for the surface rights
- in that case check out the name index
- the county may have a RSTLN index where they enter the names by the first non vowel/non rstln letter to avoid issues with mispellings
- check each previous owner to make sure they did not seperately sell off the oil/gas rights
- look for active/expired leases on the property. Use the LANDEX's web site when data is available.
- check for lease assignments. Not all will be recorded.
- if lucky, you'll find a release (of the lease) recorded when the lease expired
Landman do the same thing in verifying deed status
Follow-up: You can then take what you know and see an attorney who specializes in deed search to confirm your findings.
Locate a pipeline route
Stake a well
Every time a well is drilled, all of the properties involved have to be surveyed. A surveyor makes the well plat, identifies all water sources that require testing, maps existing pipelines, etc.
Staking a well is generally done as part of an oil and gas well survey. A survey accomplishes:
- Finding where the section and quarter corners, also called aliquot corners, are located in the section where the well is to be located.
- From this information, determining where the section, quarter and sixteenth-section lines are located. These are the aliquot lines.
- Determining the drilling windows, that is the areas within a section where a will can be drilled. Drilling windows are based on the aliquot lines.
A surveyor will place a stake where the well is to be drilled. The actual stake may consist of a nail in the ground with a piece of lathe beside it, or a rebar in the ground with a T-fence post next to it depending on ground use. Usually both a representative of the oil & gas company and the landowner meet with the surveyor to collaborate on selecting the best location.
Typically, the surveyor measures the distance from the wellhead within a 200 foot radius to any visible improvements or surface use of the land as well as the longitude, latitude and elevation of the well location. The latter information is required as part of the permitting process. The surveyor also takes photos of the well location in each of the four cardinal directions.
All of the above information is encapsulated in the surveyor's Well Location Exhibit. He also prepares a Vicinity Map showing all of the aliquot lines, location of the well in the section, road names, bodies of water and nearby towns and cities. A Visible Improvements exhibit shows any improvements within 200 feet of the well such as ditches or fences, underground or above-ground utilities, water diversion structures and irrigation pivots. It may also show the direction and distance from the wellhead to any property lines.
