I wrote about this case before. Today the Texas Supreme Court agreed to hear the plaintiff’s appeal of a judgment of the El Paso Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court’s summary of issues in the case: At issue in this case is whether courts are barred from considering deed records…
Pending before the Texas Supreme Court is the petition for review of Ammonite Oil & Gas Corporation challenging the decision of the San Antonio Court of Appeals in Ammonite Oil and Gas Corp v. Railroad Comm’n of Texas, 2021 WL 4976324 (Oct. 27, 2021). The Court of Appeals upheld the…
Two recent decisions from two federal judges in the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division, dismissed suits alleging class actions against Apache and Hilcorp for failure to pay royalties on gas used in gas processing plants. Both construed identical lease provisions. In Carl v. Hilcorp Energy, No. 4:21-CV-02133, Judge Keith…
Landowners are often faced with a conundrum: can they accept a royalty check if they believe it is in the wrong amount? Ms. Strickhausen owns a half interest in the minerals under a tract of land in La Salle County. Her minerals are subject to a lease owned by BPX…
Today a district court in Travis County held that the Texas Railroad Commission violated the Administrative Procedure Act by informally adopting rules for issuance of allocation and production sharing well permits without following the rule-making procedures of the Act. The Court ruled in an appeal by a mineral owner of…
Two unusual cases have recently been decided by the El Paso Court of Appeals, both arising out of the same underlying facts. Both deal with a tax foreclosure on royalty interests. In the late 1990s an attorney and two mineral buyers got together and proposed to taxing districts to handle…
Last week the Texas Supreme Court issued a per curiam opinion, without oral argument, reversing the judgment of the El Paso Court of Appeals in Sundown Energy LP v. HJSA No. 3 Limited Partnership, No. 19-10654. The lease at issue covers 30,450 acres in Ward County. The case is another…
On March 12 the Texas Supreme Court issued its opinion in BlueStone Natural Resources II, LLC v. Walker Murray Randle, No. 19-0459, affirming most of the judgment of the court below in favor of the royalty owners. The Court’s opinion contains a summary and discussion of its prior cases on…
A colleague recently pointed out to me that I had miss-read the Texas Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Endeavor Energy Resources v. Energen Resources Corporation. In my previous post on the case I said that the Court had concluded that the retained acreage clause being construed was ambiguous and had…
Governmental entities in Texas like school districts, municipalities, hospital districts, and counties rely heavily on property taxes to finance their operations. Mineral interests are real property interests, and when a producing well is drilled the owners of rights to production from the well, both the working interest and the royalty…