Arkansas is the only state where a 1941 case about what the word minerals meant in the 1890s now decides who owns the lithium. Two neighboring tracts, severed in different decades, can have different answers. Almost nobody sending you offers has checked yours.
Arkansas is the most interesting mineral state in the country right now, and the reason has almost nothing to do with drilling. It has to do with a case decided in 1941 about a railroad's 19th century deeds.
Berlin buys Arkansas minerals and royalties statewide, from the Smackover and brine counties in the south to the Fayetteville units in central Arkansas and the Arkoma along the Oklahoma line.
Missouri Pacific Railroad Co. v. Strohacker, 202 Ark. 645, 152 S.W.2d 557 (1941), holds that a grant or reservation of "minerals" or "mineral deposits" covers only those substances commercially recognized as minerals in that locality at the time of the conveyance.
In Strohacker itself, a 19th century reservation of "all coal and mineral deposits" did not carry oil and gas, because in that place at that time nobody understood "minerals" to include petroleum.
For eighty years this was a doctrine that came up occasionally in oil and gas title work. Then lithium arrived.
Apply Strohacker to lithium and the consequence is immediate: whether a severed mineral estate carries the lithium depends on the date of severance and on what the public in that county understood "minerals" to mean at that date. Two adjacent tracts in Columbia County, severed thirty years apart, can have different lithium owners. Neither one looks any different on a plat.
This is a title question, not a geology question, and it is answered by pulling the chain and reading the instruments. It is also, as far as we can tell, not being checked by most of the people mailing offers into south Arkansas. If you own in the Smackover fairway, this is the thing to find out before you respond to anybody, including us. We will pull your chain and tell you what we think, free, whether or not you ever sell.
On May 29, 2025 the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission unanimously approved a 2.5 percent royalty on lithium for the Reynolds Unit in Columbia and Lafayette Counties, the first lithium royalty rate ever set in the state. The applicant was SWA Lithium, the Standard Lithium and Equinor joint venture.
The sequence matters more than the number:
Arkansas is unusual in having the machinery for this at all. It has had a brine statute for decades, built for the bromine industry, giving the Commission power to establish brine production units and set the royalty rate when operators and owners cannot agree. The lithium industry inherited it.
Our Smackover and lithium brine page covers the projects, the acreage, and what a brine lease should and should not contain.
Hanna Oil & Gas Co. v. Taylor, 297 Ark. 80, 759 S.W.2d 563 (1988), is the case. Under a clause paying "one-eighth of the proceeds received by Lessee at the well," the Arkansas Supreme Court held the lessee could not deduct compression costs, reading "proceeds" to mean total proceeds and relying on the parties' course of performance. It also held that ambiguities in an oil and gas lease should be construed in favor of the lessor and against the lessee, which is a rule worth knowing. The older bookend is Clear Creek Oil & Gas Co. v. Bushmiaer, 165 Ark. 303, 264 S.W. 830 (1924).
Being candid about it: Hanna is narrow and much criticized. A federal court called it "a rather delphic opinion" and pointed out that the Hanna majority never analyzed the "at the well" language at all, resting instead on "proceeds" plus course of performance.
So the honest statement, which is not the one you will find on most buyer sites:
Send us the lease and the check stub together and we will tell you which side of Hanna your language sits on. Our royalty statement decoder explains the lines and royalty payment laws by state covers the deadlines.
Oil, under Ark. Code Ann. § 26-58-111(6): 5 percent of market value at severance where production averages more than 10 bbl per well per day, and 4 percent where it averages 10 bbl or less. Plus $0.005 per barrel under § 26-58-301(a)(1) and $0.02 per barrel under § 26-58-302(a)(1).
Natural gas: 5.0 percent, 1.5 percent, or 1.25 percent, depending on how the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission classifies the well. The 1.5 percent rate applies to high-cost gas wells for 36 months, extendable by 12 months if cost recovery has not been achieved. The 1.25 percent rate applies to marginal high-cost gas wells incapable of producing more than 100 Mcf per day.
A credit is available for approved underground saltwater disposal systems, capped statewide at $370,000 per year.
The gas classification tiers matter to a Fayetteville valuation. A well inside its 36 month high-cost window and the same well after that window has a different net to the royalty owner, and a valuation that treats the tax rate as a constant is off.
Arkansas calls forced pooling integration, administered by the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission under Ark. Code Ann. §§ 15-72-302, 15-72-303, and 15-72-324, implemented through General Rule B-43 for the Fayetteville and other unconventional areas with 640-acre units, and Rule B-44 for part of the Arkoma Basin.
An unleased mineral owner gets three options:
We do not publish an election deadline for Arkansas, because the integration order itself sets the window and there is no uniform statutory day count we could verify. Read your order. The date is in it, and it is the only date that matters.
One structural note: the Commission cannot integrate federal or State of Arkansas interests. Those tracts get spaced out of the unit, which affects the acreage arithmetic behind your decimal. See the rule of capture for why integration exists.
Arkansas is one of only three states that still enforce dower and curtesy, with Kentucky and Ohio. The statute is Ark. Code Ann. § 28-11-301.
If a decedent leaves a spouse and children, the surviving spouse is endowed of one third of all lands for life of which the spouse was seized during the marriage, unless relinquished in legal form. Subsection (b) is the part that reaches a buyer: dower and curtesy attach even to lands sold during the spouse's lifetime without the other spouse's consent in legal form, and they take priority over creditors of the estate.
A married Arkansas grantor's mineral deed is defective unless the non-owning spouse also signs to release dower and curtesy.
If you are married and selling Arkansas minerals, expect us to ask for your spouse's signature even though they own nothing. If your chain has a gap of this kind decades back, which is common, we cure it at our cost as part of a purchase.
Arkansas has no dormant mineral act. Your interest does not lapse because you did nothing with it. The nearest analog, Ark. Code Ann. § 18-11-105, forfeits the interest of a non-possessing cotenant who is unlocatable and silent for 20 years, and mineral and other subsurface rights held by cotenants are understood to be carved out of it.
What can move an Arkansas mineral interest is adverse possession, and the requirements are demanding: actual possession, plus color of title, plus payment of ad valorem taxes. Under Ark. Code Ann. § 18-11-102 the period is 7 years for unimproved and unenclosed land, and 15 years for wild and unimproved land.
Critically for a severed owner, paying taxes on the surface does not reach a severed mineral estate. That is settled in Claybrooke v. Barnes, 180 Ark. 678, 22 S.W.2d 390 (1929), and Jones v. Brown, 211 Ark. 164, 199 S.W.2d 973 (1947). A surface owner who has farmed the ground for fifty years has not thereby acquired your minerals.
The regulator is the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission, now within the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment. The AOGC Data Explorer is the cleanest free entry point, with lease and well data search, well log search, and a statewide GIS well layer at gis.arkansas.gov. The main AOGC site sits behind a bot filter that blocks some browsers and VPNs, which trips people up.
Land records are county by county, recorded with the Circuit Clerk and Recorder in each of 75 counties. There is no statewide portal. See well records by state.
A south Arkansas owner may be receiving forty dollars a month from a stripper well drilled in 1961 while sitting inside or beside a brine unit. Under the standard method, take the last twelve months and apply a multiple, that interest is worth a few thousand dollars. That method is close to useless here, and it is exactly the method a mailer offer uses.
We read the chain rather than the check. We tell you what your instruments actually grant, where you sit against the brine units, what the oil is worth on its own terms, and what the brine exposure is worth as a separate, explicitly stated line. We have no minimum interest size and we pay all closing costs, including the curative work.
Send a check stub, a deed, or a brine lease you have been offered. Free, no obligation, no mailing list, and if keeping it is the right answer, which on advancing brine acreage it frequently is, we will say so.
Last reviewed August 2026. The lithium picture in Arkansas moves quickly and rates and units change. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm or a tax advisor, and this page is general information rather than advice about your interest. A Strohacker question on real acreage is worth an Arkansas lawyer's time, and a brine lease should be read by one before you sign it.
South Arkansas's legacy oil producer, and now the center of the country's domestic lithium story. If you own in the Smackover fairway you may own two assets, and nearly every offer prices only one.
Central Arkansas gas, matured from a boom into a steady long-tail asset. Large 640-acre units, thousands of small decimals, and a lot of owners who stopped paying attention when the drilling stopped.
The Arkansas side of the same geology we work daily in eastern Oklahoma: Woodford gas and shallow legacy production across the western counties.
South Arkansas has commercially produced bromine from Smackover brine for decades in Union and Columbia Counties. Some tracts already carry a separate recorded brine lease from that era, which changes everything about the lithium question.
Smackover and brine counties in the south, Fayetteville counties in central Arkansas, and Arkoma counties along the Oklahoma line. We buy in all 75 counties.
Everything a Arkansas owner needs in one place: who owns what under state law, how royalties must be paid and by when, what a buyer can and cannot deduct, the tax treatment of a sale, and the deadlines that quietly cost people their minerals. Free, and no sign-up.
Read the Arkansas guideThe things owners here most often wish they had read first. All free, none of it gated.
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Prefer the phone? Call or text 918-984-1645 and you will get Stephen, the owner, not a call center. If we miss you, we text back the same day.