Native Texan and Austinite Lawrence Wright, longtime journalist and Reporter at Large at the New Yorker, has written about Texas’ love affair with and dependence on oil, in the January 1 issue of the New Yorker. “The Dark Bounty of Texas Oil” is a 10,000-foot flyover of Texas’ oil business,…
Every year I look forward to receiving William Osborn‘s holiday photo. William is an Austin oil and gas attorney, an amateur historian, a historic preservationist, an alley gardener, an all-around renaissance man, and my cousin. Every December for the last twenty-five years he has sent a photo to his clients…
I got the idea to start this blog after I made a presentation to a landowner group in which I distributed a checklist for negotiating an oil and gas lease. Soon thereafter, I began receiving calls from people who had found the checklist on the internet. The organization that sponsored…
Last Tuesday the Texas Supreme Court heard arguments in three cases on oil-and-gas-related topics. Murphy Oil v. Adams, No. 16-0505: Our firm represents the Herbsts in this case. Murphy owns a lease on their lands in Atascosa County, shown in blue below. While the Herbst Lease was in its primary…
I ran across a blog post by Andy Nold, a surveyor, about his research into a large subdivision of land in Reeves County. It provides great incite into the challenges faced by surveyors in West Texas. Here is his post, with permission: Today’s surveying challenge is the garden spot of…
Dragon v. Trial, from the San Antonio Court of Appeals, No. 04-16-00758-CV, decided November 8, is a case that may be of interest only to title attorneys and landmen and those of us who delight in the minutiae of land titles. It is also, like many title disputes, the story…
Sent to me by a friend: Edgar Freeman Smith was the youngest child of a circuit preacher. By age eleven he had to work in a coal mine to support his widowed mother. When he was eighteen they lost their home to foreclosure. People told him to learn a trade…
My clients regularly complain of flares from wells on their property. Most leases don’t require royalty payments on flared gas, so their royalty is going up in smoke. Flares often don’t function properly, resulting in emissions of toxic gases. Flares make noise. The Environmental Defense Fund recently released an excellent…
This is my 500th blog post. My first post was on March 23, 2009, the first of three posts about deductibility of post-production costs from royalties. Since then I’ve written about post-production costs twenty-three times. I decided to start this blog as a way to provide information about developments in…
Oil and gas cases I’m following that are now pending before the Texas Supreme Court: 16-0107, Hill v. Shamoun & Norman Fight over attorneys’ fees related to litigation of trust from H.L. Hunt Estate. Case has been argued. I wrote about the case in a prior post. 16-0804, Perryman v.…