The Texas Supreme Court has recently refused to hear Friddle v. Fisher, 378 S.W.3d 475 (Tex.App.-Texarkana 2012). The court of appeals’ opinion has an interesting discussion of the duties of a mineral owner to owners of non-participating royalty interests burdening the mineral estate and of the application of the discovery…
Oil and Gas Lawyer Blog
Shale Reserves – Revolution or Ponzi Scheme?
A study written by J. David Hughes and published in February by the Post Carbon Institute claims that shale gas reserves are vastly overstated. “Drill Baby Drill – Can Unconventional Fuels Usher In a New Era of Energy Abundance?” A companion article by Deborah Rogers claims that the shale “frenzy” is…
Oil Pipeline Bill Dead in Texas Legislature?
The pipeline industry bill intended to “fix” the issues raised by Texas Rice Land Partners v. Denbury Pipeline, appears to be dead in the Texas legislature. The issue: requiring pipelines that assert the power of eminent domain to prove that they qualify as common carriers. The Texas Supreme Court held…
Decoupling Oil and Gas
A recent editorial in the Houston Chronicle makes a good point: we should no longer think of “oil and gas” together. Their paths have diverged, at least in the US. The prices of oil and gas used to be roughly equivalent, based on their energy value – their Btu content.…
Big Boom in the Cline Shale
Information below passed on to me by a client, from a friend of a friend: Following are charts and photos of a tour of Cline Shale exploration and operations yesterday afternoon. I remember the boom in the 50s and the late 70s. Those are minimal compared to the massive…
Who Owns Recycled Water?
The drought in Texas, along with improved recyclying technology, has driven efforts to increase recycling of water used in hydraulic fracturing of wells. According to one estimate, the fracing of wells in 2011 consumed on the order of 135 billion gallons of water – about 0.3 percent of total U.S.…
News in the Oil Patch
Range Resources Range Resources’ battle with the Lipskys and Alisa Rich continues, now in a confusing appeal of the trial court’s order denying the Lipskys’ and Rich’s motion to throw out Range’s counterclaim under the Texas law prohibiting so-called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs. http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/04/02/4745433/appeals-judges-return-range-suit.html Earthquakes and Disposal…
House Bill 325 to Amend Open Beaches Act
State Representative Harold Dutton, Jr. has introduced a bill in the Texas Legislature to amend Texas’ Open Beaches Act. What does this have to do with oil and gas, you may ask? Read on. Last year, the Texas Supreme Court decided a case interpreting the Open Beaches Act, Severance v.…
More on Production Allocation Wells
Production allocation wells continue to be a simmering issue in Texas. Last Friday I attended the Ernest E. Smith Institute on Oil, Gas and Mineral Law sponsored by the University of Texas School of Law, and one of the topics presented was a paper titled “Drafting Production Sharing Agreements.” The paper…
Water Used for Fracing Exceeds Oil Produced in Texas
I recently read this astounding report from the Texas Tribune: “In 2011, Texas used a greater number of barrels of water for oil and natural gas fracking (about 632 million) than the number of barrels of oil it produced (about 441 million), according to figures from the Texas Water Development…