Eastern Ohio Utica royalties are worth real money. But Ohio is also the one state in the country where a surface owner has two separate statutory routes to take your minerals away, and the Ohio Supreme Court has confirmed both of them work.
The Utica is where Appalachian gas development has been most concentrated over the last decade, and eastern Ohio royalty owners sit on genuinely valuable interests. It is also the most legally dangerous place in the country to be an absentee mineral owner.
Berlin buys Utica and Point Pleasant royalties and minerals across eastern Ohio, and Utica rights beneath Marcellus acreage in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The first half of this page is about keeping what you have. The second half is about what it is worth.
This is the part no competitor page states plainly.
The Dormant Mineral Act, R.C. 5301.56. Twenty years with no savings event, and a surface owner can begin the process of taking the interest. The savings events are a recorded title transaction, actual production or withdrawal, underground gas storage use, a drilling or mining permit plus a recorded affidavit, a recorded claim to preserve, or creation of a separate tax parcel number for the mineral interest. Delay rental payments do not count.
The procedure: certified mail notice or publication, then an affidavit of abandonment filed with the county recorder 30 to 60 days later, then a 60 day window for the holder to record a claim to preserve or evidence of a savings event. Nothing filed, and the interest vests in the surface owner.
Corban v. Chesapeake Exploration, L.L.C., 2016-Ohio-5796, established that the 1989 version does not operate automatically and requires a quiet title action, and that anyone claiming abandonment after June 2006 must follow the 2006 procedures even where the alleged abandonment predates 2006.
The Marketable Title Act, R.C. 5301.47 and following. A separate 40 year root of title regime. In West v. Bode, 2020-Ohio-5473, the Ohio Supreme Court held the two acts are independent, alternative statutory mechanisms and that both apply to severed oil and gas interests.
So a surface owner does not have to pick. And an Ohio mineral owner who has never recorded anything is exposed on two fronts.
What to do about it. Record a claim to preserve the interest. It is inexpensive and it is the direct answer. Do that before you spend any time thinking about selling. If a surface owner has already served you, get an Ohio oil and gas attorney inside the 60 days. We can point you to several, and we will do that whether or not you ever sell to us.
Compare the neighbors: Pennsylvania has no dormant mineral act that extinguishes ownership, and West Virginia's statute on missing and abandoning owners is a leasing mechanism defined by intent to relinquish rather than a lapse period. Ohio is the outlier.
Ohio develops the horizontal Utica mainly through unitization under R.C. 1509.28, not through the compulsory pooling statute at R.C. 1509.27.
An applicant must have the consent of owners of at least 65 percent of the land area overlying the pool, and those consenting owners must also be required to pay at least 65 percent of the costs. The Chief of the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management decides.
If you are a minority owner in a proposed unit, you have standing to participate in that proceeding. The terms the Chief sets for nonconsenting owners are what you will live with for the life of the unit, and they are much easier to influence before the order than after. Send us the application and we will read it free.
In Lutz v. Chesapeake Appalachia, L.L.C., 148 Ohio St.3d 524, 71 N.E.3d 1010 (2016), the Ohio Supreme Court declined to adopt either the at the well rule or the marketable product rule, holding that an oil and gas lease is a contract governed by traditional rules of construction. On remand, the federal court applied the at the well rule to leases containing "market value at the well" language.
Ohio therefore behaves as an at the well state for leases using that phrase, and there is no controlling statewide rule for anything else. Your document is the whole answer, and it makes reading the lease more consequential in Ohio than in states with a default rule in either direction.
Three adjacent states, three regimes: Ohio has no rule, Pennsylvania permits net back under Kilmer, and West Virginia largely forbids deductions under Tawney and now Romeo. Our royalty statement decoder explains what the lines on your stub mean.
Common in Ohio, and urgent for the reason above. A check stub, an old lease, a deed, a notice you received, or a county and a family name is enough for us to start. We run the county records and the Ohio DNR files, tell you what you own, and tell you whether the interest is preserved or at risk.
That research is free and we do it whether or not you sell. If the answer is that you need to record a claim to preserve and keep your minerals, we will say so and that will be the end of it. See transferring inherited minerals and selling inherited minerals before probate is done.
Last reviewed August 2026. Ohio dormant mineral and marketable title law continues to develop. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm, and this page is general information rather than legal advice. If a surface owner has served you with an abandonment notice, hire an Ohio oil and gas attorney immediately.
The actual target in most of what gets called the Utica. Organic rich carbonate and shale beneath the Utica proper, and the source of nearly all eastern Ohio horizontal production.
Belmont, Monroe, and Jefferson Counties produce very high rate dry gas. Simple royalty math, strong per well economics, and the counties where Ohio value is most concentrated.
The central fairway through Carroll, Harrison, Guernsey, and Noble produces liquids rich gas exposed to processing economics and, because Ohio has no statewide deduction rule, to whatever your lease happens to say.
Present along the Ohio River, generally shallower and less developed here than across the river, and frequently held under the same lease as the Utica.
The eastern Ohio counties carry the Utica value. We also buy Utica rights beneath Marcellus acreage in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
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