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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 law of interest to land and mineral owners. Lawyers have continuing education requirements and attend seminars in their specialty where they hear other attorneys present papers on current issues in the law. But there are few such seminars for land and mineral owners, and legal seminar papers are not designed for laypersons. I couldn’t find any other blogs that provided the content I wanted. So I ventured into the blogosphere, a territory I knew little about. It has been a fun and productive ride.

When I began this effort the Barnett and Haynesville shales were booming, the controversy over environmental effects of hydraulic fracturing was bubbling up, and lawyers were just beginning to grapple with the legal issues raised by horizontal wells. Since 2009 the shale boom has revived the domestic onshore oil and gas industry and in the process changed the international politics of global energy production and supply. OPEC and Saudi Arabia have tried unsuccessfully to stifle the shale boom. Talk of peak oil has disappeared. Global demand for oil continues to increase in the face of the now-incontrovertible evidence of hydrocarbons’ adverse effect on our atmosphere. There are five-day traffic jams in China, and India has passed China in the rate of growth of oil consumption, increasing 8.3% in 2016.

Once the largest landowner in Texas with 3.5 million acres of land, Texas Pacific Land Trust now owns 888,333 acres of land in West Texas. The Trust is owned by holders of “shares of proprietary interest” traded on the New York Stock Exchange. TPLT’s story is a window into the history of Texas and railroads in the 19th century.

Texas and Pacific Railway was created by federal charter in 1871. Its charter was to build a southern transcontinental railroad between Marshall, Texas and San Diego, California. Railroad companies were given land grants in exchange for building rail line, and the U.S. Congress granted T&P twenty sections of land per mile in California and forty sections per mile through the territory that is now Arizona and New Mexico. The State of Texas (where there were no federal lands) agreed to grant T&P twenty sections per mile for the portion of the line crossing Texas. The panic of 1873 caused financial difficulties, and by 1876 only 444 miles had been built. In 1879, Jay Gould bought the company and began laying track west. Gould merged T&P with Southern Pacific Railway, and by 1881 it had built a total of 972 miles of track, entitling it to 12.4 million acres of land. But because it had not built all of the line within the time required by its charter, T&P was awarded only 5,173,120 acres, later reduced to 4,917,074 acres – 3.5 million of that in Texas.

In 1888, the T&P went through bankruptcy and receivership, and the bondholders who financed the railroad were awarded the land in Texas that had been granted to T&P. The bondholders created a trust, Texas Pacific Land Trust, to liquidate those lands for the benefit of the bondholders, receiving 3.5 million acres of land. The certificates of trust issued to the bondholders were later listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The mineral estate under the land was spun off into a separate entity and later sold to Texaco, now Chevron. TPLT owns a royalty interest in almost 500,000 acres of its land.