Oil and Gas Lawyer Blog
A royalty owner in the Barnett Shale has sued Chesapeake in Oklahoma federal court for failure to properly pay royalties. The suit, Robyn Coffey vs. Chesapeake Exploration, L.L.C. and Chesapeake Operating, Inc., Civil Action No. CIV-10-1054-C, was filed on September 27 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, in Oklahoma City. A copy of the complaint can be viewed here: Coffey v Chesapeake.pdf The plaintiff seeks to bring the case on behalf of all royalty owners in the Barnett Shale formation, as a class action.
The plaintiff alleges that Chesapeake “employs a scheme” to reduce royalty payments by selling the gas to its wholly owned subsidiaries at a price “substantially less than either the market value at well or the amount actually received by Chesapeake Operating.”
The royalty clause in the plaintiff”s oil and gas lease is unusual. It provides for payment of royalties based on the “market value at the point of sale,” but not less than “the actual amount realized by the Lessee.” The clause says that all royalty paid to the lessor “shall be free of all costs and expenses related to the exploration, production and marketing of oil and gas production from the lease including, but not limited to, costs of compression, dehydration, treatment and transportation.” Most gas royalty clauses provide that gas royalties will be based on “the amount realized by Lessee, computed at the mouth of the well,” or similar language.
The plaintiff’s lease does not expressly address sales by a lessee to a company which is affiliated with the lessee. The plaintiff in this case will therefore have to prove in effect that the sale to Chesapeake’s affiliate is a sham designed to cheat its royalty owners. It is possible to draft a royalty clause that would deal with sales to affiliates — in effect providing that royalties shall be based on the proceeds received by the lessee or any affiliate of the lessee — in other words, based on the price received in the first arms-length sale to an unrelated third party.
The case is obviously drafted to be a class action. The amount of the individual plaintiff’s claim is not stated in the complaint, but the plaintiff owns royalties on only about 3 acres. If the plaintiff is able to get the case certified as a class action on behalf of all Chesapeake royalty owners in the Barnett Shale, millions of dollars of royalty will be at issue in the case. It is evident that the lawyers elected to file in Oklahoma because the Texas Supreme Court has been very hostile to royalty owner class actions in Texas. In light of the unusual language in this royalty owner’s lease, it will be interesting to see if the federal court in Oklahoma will be willing to certify this case as a class action.