Surface damage – what must operators do to accommodate existing uses of the surface estate?
Today we conclude Blawgletter's seven-part series on the Hottest Oil & Gas Claims for 2015, a paper we co-wrote for the 66th Oil & Gas Law Conference in Houston. This last piece deals with maybe the hardest claim to make
Short-payment of royalties – when do post-production costs cross the line into unreasonableness?
This next-to-last entry in Blawgletter's seven-part series on the hottest oil & gas claims for returns to the theme of royalty owners who receive less than they believe the lease entitles them to. Part 6 addresses what happens when the operator deducts
Blawgletter offers the fourth installment in the seven-part series on the Hottest Oil & Gas Claims for 2015. This time, we address whether flaring gas qualifies as "use" on which the operator must pay royalties.
Legal backdrop
Royalty clauses typically require payment of royalty for oil and gas “produced from the Leased Premises and sold or
Oil and gas and the Empire State
Does a state's years-long ban on the fracking of oil and gas wells extend the "primary" term of a lease until the ban ends, allowing the frackers who couldn't frack more time to come back and frack?
This week, the highest court of an important commercial state that
Short-payment of royalties
Today we come to number three in Blawgletter's seven-part series on The Hottest Oil & Gas Claims for 2015, a paper that we presented at the 66th Annual Oil & Gas Conference in Houston. The third topic describes an area of legal uncertainty around a common oil and gas term — "well"
Breach of covenant to administer lease — must the operator use the latest drilling and completion technology?
Today Blawgletter continues our seven-part series from the 66th Annual Oil & Gas Law Conference in Houston with part 2. We turn now to an issue that had more resonance when high prices dominated and made a call
A group of oil and gas lessors/royalty owners — who won more than $21 million on fraud and breach of lease claims at trial but lost in the court of appeals — prevailed today in the Supreme Court of Texas.
A rarity for the producer-leaning Court, the 9-0 decision in Hooks v. Samson Lone Star,
Big victory for big oil . . . and big gas
The Fifth Circuit handed a large win today to oil and gas lessees in the Lone Star State.
The dispute that the court addressed concerned computation of royalties, which an oil and gas producer pays to landowners and others in return for the right
Oil and gas cases seem to supply more than their share of fights about the meaning of contract terms. Why? We suspect it has something to do with money.
Take Total E&P USA, Inc. v. Kerr-McGee Oil & Gas Corp., No. 11-30038 (5th Cir. Mar. 12, 2013). In that case, two of three lessees
The Fifth Circuit ruled last week that the terms of an oil and gas lease could give a real estate firm the right to damages for drilling operations that hurt the firm's efforts to build and sell homes in a Shreveport subdivision. Greenwood 950, L.L.C. v. Chesapeake Louisiana, L.P., No. 11-30436 (5th Cir. June 12