Sell your Alaska mineral rights and royalties.

Most Alaska minerals belong to the state, the federal government, or Native corporations, which makes the private and inherited interests that do exist unusual, and unusually hard to get valued. If you hold an overriding royalty, a carved-out interest, or inherited acreage tied to Cook Inlet or the North Slope, we will actually do the work on it.

Whatever you own, producing royalties, non-producing acreage, or an inherited fraction, we will identify it from whatever paperwork exists, value it off the actual wells and activity, and show you the reasoning with the offer. Free, no obligation, and if keeping it is the right answer, we will say so.

Start here: most Alaska "mineral rights" are not mineral rights

Alaska is the hardest state in the country to own minerals in, and the reason is a single sentence Congress wrote in 1958.

Section 6(i) of the Alaska Statehood Act requires that every sale, grant, deed or patent of land the State received "shall be subject to and contain a reservation to the State of all of the minerals." It is not a policy the State chose and could change. Any land conveyed contrary to that section is forfeited to the United States. Alaska cannot create private minerals even if it wanted to.

The State then wrote that command into AS 38.05.125, which is unusual in a useful way: it does not describe the reservation, it sets out the exact deed clause in quotation marks. Every state conveyance recites it. In City of Kenai v. Cook Inlet Natural Gas Storage Alaska, LLC, 373 P.3d 473 (Alaska 2016), the Alaska Supreme Court held that even subsurface pore space falls inside that reservation, and put the principle plainly: "A patent cannot convey what has been reserved by law."

The result, per the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, is that land in private ownership other than Native corporation land is "less than one percent" of Alaska. Most of even that one percent is surface only.

The four-question triage

Before anyone values anything, answer these in order. Who patented the land, and when?

1. Conveyed by the State of Alaska, at any time. Almost certainly no minerals, by operation of AS 38.05.125.
2. Conveyed by the United States after 1958. Minerals are generally reserved. Check the patent.
3. Patented by the United States before statehood, especially a homestead, townsite or trade and manufacturing site on the Kenai Peninsula or in the Matanuska-Susitna valley. This is the real candidate, and it is where the private minerals that do exist came from.
4. A Native allotment. Under 43 U.S.C. 1634, allotments reinstated under that section reserve all interests in oil, gas and coal to the United States, and the original 1906 act covered only land classified as non-mineral. An inherited allotment usually is not an oil and gas interest.

Where private minerals actually are

Cook Inlet. BLM's own descriptions of the five Southcentral units it administers, Swanson River, Kenai, Beluga River, Beaver Creek and Birch Hill, list each as containing a mix of "Federal, State, CIRI, and Fee leases." Fee means privately owned minerals.

Those units date from 1956 to 1967, before or right at statehood, which is the mechanism: federal patents issued during the Kenai homesteading era could and sometimes did convey the full mineral estate, and interests severed from those patents are still out there. Hilcorp Alaska operates all five today.

The North Slope is different. Prudhoe Bay, Kuparuk, Alpine, Willow, Pikka and Point Thomson sit on State of Alaska leases, federal acreage, and Arctic Slope Regional Corporation subsurface. There is essentially no individual private fee mineral ownership there. If you hold something tied to the North Slope, it is far more likely an override carved out of a lease than a mineral interest, and overrides are real, valuable and saleable.

How to search Alaska records, because it is not like anywhere else

The mental model from Oklahoma or Texas fails here. Alaska has no counties, and its boroughs do not record deeds.

• Recording is a State function. The DNR State Recorder's Office runs 34 recording districts out of just two physical offices, Anchorage and Fairbanks.
• Recording district boundaries are not borough boundaries. They descend from historic judicial and mining districts, with names like Chitina, Manley Hot Springs and Nulato that match no present-day government.
• The Recorder's MTRS search, by meridian, township, range and section, is the closest thing Alaska has to a tract index, and it is the tool to use.
• The critical limitation: the online grantor and grantee index runs from 1970 to the present only. Anything earlier means the historic books. For a pre-statehood Kenai patent, which is exactly the period that matters, expect to work with the office directly or hire help.
• For the original federal patent, use the BLM General Land Office Records site at glorecords.blm.gov. That document is what tells you whether minerals were reserved or conveyed, and it is the decisive piece of paper.

For Cook Inlet questions, the districts that matter are Kenai, Homer, Seldovia, Anchorage and Palmer.

The honest word on the market

We could not find evidence of an active market for Alaska mineral and royalty interests, and that is not surprising. There is almost no inventory, the State legally cannot create more, Native corporation subsurface is institutionally held and its stock cannot be sold, the North Slope has no private fee position to buy, and the private minerals that do exist sit in a mature declining gas basin serving a local utility. On top of that, diligence costs more in Alaska than the interests are usually worth.

So if you own something here, the realistic buyers are the operator on the acreage, an adjacent working interest owner, or a local party, rather than a national mineral fund. Get the title question answered before you spend money on a valuation, because the most likely outcome is that there is nothing to sell. We will do that first part for free, and we will tell you plainly if the answer is no.