One of the complaints made against the Texas Railroad Commission in the current legislative session was that it provides very little information about its environmental compliance efforts in the oil field. The Commission provides little information about the number of violations, how they were resolved, the identity of the violators,…
Last week the Texas Supreme Court issued its opinion in Lightning Oil Company v. Anadarko E&P Onshore, LLC, No. 15-0910, denying Lightning Oil’s trespass claim against Anadarko. Lightning Oil lost in the trial court, the San Antonio Court of Appeals, and now the Supreme Court. To understand the case, it…
Our firm hosted its 4th land and mineral owner seminar last Friday, and I spoke on deductability of post-production costs from lease royalties in light of the Texas Supreme Court’s decision last year in Chesapeake v. Hyder. My paper on post-production costs may be viewed here: Post-Production Costs after Hyder
A report from Texans for Public Justice, Public Citizen and the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter details the contributions made by the oil and gas industry to Texas legislatures’ campaign funds. You can find the report, Running on Hydrocarbons: Oil and Gas Funding to Every Texas Lawmaker, here: http://www.tpj.org/ No…
Here’s another great graph explaining US Energy production and consumption, from the Energy Information Administration. It’s called an Energy Flow Diagram. Numbers are in quadrillion BTU’s. Click on image to enlarge: Consider: We still import 21.72 QBTU of petroleum, about 22% of our total consumption – about what we consume…
Information about the seminar can be found here: http://www.gdhmoilandgas.com/.
Last December, the Eastland Court of Appeals issued its opinion in Crystal River Oil & Gas, LLC v. Patton, No. 11-15-00217-CV. Crystal River owned and operated wells on an oil and gas lease in Stonewall County. The oil wells on the lease produced twenty barrels of salt water for every…
Friday was the anniversary of Black Sunday, in 1935, the worst dust storm in the Dust Bowl days of the Texas Panhandle. The photo below is of Pampa, Texas on that day. My parents were married in 1929, after their high school graduation. They farmed outside Friona, Texas, in the…
Click on image to enlarge.
For a few hours on March 11, for the first time, more than half the electric power used in California came from solar power, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The wholesale price for electricity went negative. In other words, power generators had to pay wholesalers to take their…