A basin decides your geology. A state line decides your law. Most basins cross one, and the difference between the two sides is frequently larger than owners realize. These pages cover both.
These are the pages where the law matters most, because two owners with nearly identical geology and nearly identical leases can end up with materially different checks depending on which side of a line they are on.
North Dakota and Montana. A cost free 16 percent for unleased North Dakota owners against one eighth in Montana, a 20 year abandonment statute on one side and none on the other, and a 6 percent royalty withholding on the other.
Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Deductions are lawful under Kilmer on one side of the line and largely forbidden under Tawney and Romeo on the other. Plus the Dunham Rule, which decides whether you own the gas at all.
Eastern Ohio and beneath Appalachian Marcellus acreage. Ohio gives a surface owner two independent statutory routes to take a severed mineral interest, and the Ohio Supreme Court has confirmed both work.
Wyoming. Seven potential targets stacked under one section, a statutory royalty definition that protects your check, and no state income tax when you sell.
Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska. What SB 19-181 did to development timing, the 45 percent pooling threshold that gives unleased owners real leverage, and the Codell inventory nobody counts.
Utah. 910 permits in 90 days across Uintah and Duchesne, more than anywhere outside the Delaware and Midland, and a consolidation nobody has explained to owners.
New Mexico. More than 23,000 producing wells of long-life gas, priced by most buyers as though slow meant finished.
Kern County alone has 34,272 producing wells, more than any county in America, and almost no buyer will quote it.
Arkansas, northeast Texas, and north Louisiana. A century old oil formation that became the country's biggest lithium prospect. Arkansas set a 2.5 percent royalty by ruling; Texas has not decided who owns the lithium at all.
West Texas and southeast New Mexico. The most valuable minerals on earth and the most heavily mailed. Stacked benches, and a state line where the tax and royalty regimes diverge sharply.
Woodford, Meramec, Osage, and Springer across Grady, Garvin, McClain, Kingfisher, Blaine, and Canadian. The sections we know best.
Deep Anadarko gas and the Granite Wash trend running to the Texas Panhandle.
Pennsylvanian Cherokee sands on the Anadarko shelf: Ellis, Roger Mills, and Custer, where Mewbourne drills hundreds of wells nobody writes about.
Eastern Oklahoma gas, from the Woodford to the shallow Hartshorne coals, and the Arkansas side of the same geology.
South central Oklahoma, small, structurally complex, and largely overlooked by everyone else.
Forced pooling, the Corporation Commission, 47 of 77 counties bought in, and the state we understand better than anyone selling you mail.
107 rigs, second only to the Delaware among American oil plays, and roughly 58,000 producing wells. Stacked Spraberry and Wolfcamp benches that an income multiple cannot see.
42,634 producing wells, the second largest well population in the country, and ten rigs. Old shallow Permian under CO2 flood, and the most systematically underpriced acreage we see.
Reeves, Loving, Ward, and Culberson, plus the New Mexico side in Lea and Eddy.
South Texas oil, condensate, and gas with more than a decade of development history.
San Augustine has ten rigs running, the twelfth most of any county in the country, against fewer than 600 producing wells. The play's growth edge moved to Texas.
Robertson, Leon, and Freestone. A deep Bossier gas play that did not exist five years ago, and almost nothing has been written about it for mineral owners.
Not finished. 166 wells first produced since January 2024 and 156 permits in the last 90 days, in a field most owners were told was over.
The Giddings trend across Fayette, Burleson, Lee and Washington. 4,329 wells still producing, Magnolia holding 2,405, and fractured chalk that breaks every standard decline assumption.
Cotton Valley, Travis Peak, and the legacy East Texas Field.
Granite Wash and the Anadarko Basin geology we work daily on the Oklahoma side.
Mineral buyers follow rigs, so the marketing budgets go where the drilling is. These are fields with very large owner populations, real production, and almost no coverage written for the families who hold them. Being ignored by buyers is not the same as being worthless, and it usually means the first offer you get is a low one.
New Mexico. Roughly 11,500 wells on the shallow shelf above the Delaware, in the same counties, valued wrongly by Delaware Basin math.
Southwest Kansas. Ninety years of shallow gas, called depleted since the 1970s and still paying, plus a helium question almost nobody asks.
Northern Oklahoma and southern Kansas. The most hyped play in America for three years, then silence. 7,033 wells still produce.
Arkansas. 5,571 producing wells, five new wells since January 2024, and no rig. A stream to be valued, not a story.
Pike, Floyd, Knott and Letcher. 16,731 wells, no rigs, and coal severances that decide what a family actually owns.
Fort Worth Basin. Declared finished a decade ago, quietly being re-completed, and a stopped check that usually does not mean a stopped well.
Send a check stub, a legal description, or just a county and a family name. We will tell you what basin you sit in, what has been drilled and permitted around you, what the interest is worth and how we got there, and whether we think you should keep it. Free, and no obligation of any kind.
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