Hugoton gas, Mississippi Lime oil, and central Kansas conventional production. Plus the 20 year lapse statute that has quietly transferred a lot of Kansas minerals to surface owners who bothered to read it.
Kansas is a mature producing state with an enormous number of small, old, fractional interests and almost no serious content aimed at the people who own them. The top search result for selling Kansas mineral rights is a listings directory. Everything below it is a template page with the state name swapped in.
Berlin buys Kansas minerals and royalties: Hugoton gas in the southwest, Mississippian oil along the Oklahoma line, Central Kansas Uplift production, and southeast Kansas shallow gas. Our home basin is the Anadarko in Oklahoma, and the Kansas counties on that state line are the same rock we underwrite every week.
Kansas is one of a minority of states where doing nothing can cost you your minerals.
K.S.A. 55-1602 provides that an interest in coal, oil, gas, or other minerals that is unused for a period of 20 years shall lapse, and that ownership reverts to the current surface owner, unless the owner files a statement of claim under K.S.A. 55-1604. The definition of a mineral interest is at K.S.A. 55-1601.
The statement of claim must state the owner's name and address and describe the land, and must be filed with the register of deeds before the 20 year period expires. An owner who receives notice of a lapse, or gains actual knowledge of it, is given a 60 day grace period. Filing a claim is itself treated as a "use" as of the date of filing.
What constitutes "use" is developed in case law rather than spelled out in the statute, which is exactly why an owner should not try to reason it out alone. If you hold a Kansas interest that has never produced, has not been leased in decades, and has had nothing recorded against it, this is more urgent than any decision about selling.
We will tell you where you stand for free, including when the answer is that you should record a statement of claim and keep your minerals. That is the whole answer sometimes, and it costs us a deal to say it.
Compare North Dakota, which has a similar 20 year statute, and Wyoming and Montana, which have none at all.
If you read an older article about Kansas royalties, it probably told you Kansas is a marketable condition state where the operator bears the cost of making gas saleable. That framing traces to Gilmore v. Superior Oil Co., 192 Kan. 388 (1964), and Sternberger v. Marathon Oil Co., 257 Kan. 315 (1995).
It is out of date. In Fawcett v. Oil Producers, Inc. of Kansas, 302 Kan. 350, 352 P.3d 1032 (2015), the Kansas Supreme Court held that an operator satisfies its marketability duty when it delivers the gas to the purchaser in a condition acceptable to the purchaser in a good faith transaction. Raw gas can therefore be marketable at the wellhead, and gathering, processing, and transportation costs incurred after that point are generally deductible from the royalty. See also Ruth Fawcett Trust v. Oil Producers Inc. of Kansas (Kan. 2022).
The practical result: your lease language decides your deductions in Kansas, and the default runs toward the operator. That puts Kansas with North Dakota and Pennsylvania and against Wyoming and Colorado. If a buyer valuing your Kansas gas royalty has not asked to see your lease, they are not valuing it.
Kansas owners deal with both a production tax and an annual property tax, which is unusual and which changes the sell or hold arithmetic on small interests.
Severance tax: 8 percent of the gross value of oil or gas, K.S.A. 79-4217. That rate is toward the top nationally. The statute exempts gas used as lease fuel or to lift oil, low production oil wells at thresholds that vary by depth and oil price, tertiary and secondary recovery, and historically new pools for their first 24 months. Legislation effective July 1, 2012 eliminated the new pool exemption for all new gas pools and retained it for oil pools only where production does not exceed 50 barrels per well per day.
Ad valorem property tax on oil and gas leaseholds, assessed annually. There is a low production exemption under K.S.A. 79-201t for oil leases producing 3 barrels per day or less, or 5 barrels per day or less at depths over 2,000 feet, but royalty interests do not qualify for it.
That second one matters more than its size suggests. An owner with a tiny Hugoton royalty can face an annual filing and an annual bill against an interest paying a few dollars a month. It is one of the most common reasons Kansas owners tell us they want out, and it is a legitimate reason. See small mineral interests.
The Hugoton has been producing since the 1930s. Four generations of inheritance across a field that large produces exactly what you would expect: hundreds of thousands of fractional interests, many held by people who do not know they own them, many with royalties sitting in operator suspense because nobody probated a 1970s estate.
That is not a defect in the asset. It is a market failure. The fixed cost of running title, preparing a deed, recording it, and processing transfer orders with each operator is nearly the same on a small interest as a large one, so buyers with a minimum check size do not respond at all. Owners read the silence as evidence of no value.
We run our own title and we consolidate fractional ownership in areas we already own in, which is why we can buy small Kansas interests and pay all the closing costs. If money is sitting in suspense, we will tell you how to claim it and you keep it, whether or not you sell. See unclaimed royalties.
Last reviewed August 2026. Statutes and rates change. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop, not a law firm or a tax advisor, and this page is general information rather than advice about your interest. If you may have a lapse problem, talk to a Kansas oil and gas attorney.
The Mississippian and Anadarko geology continues south; see our Oklahoma page and the basin index.
Send a check stub, a lease, a deed, an old tax notice, or just a county and a family name. We will locate the interest, check whether the lapse statute is a concern, tell you what it is worth and how we got there, and tell you honestly whether selling makes sense. Free, no obligation, no minimum interest size.
One of the largest gas fields ever found in North America, now deep into a very long tail. Small monthly checks, decades of remaining life, and thousands of fractional interests nobody has consolidated.
The horizontal play that ran hot across the Kansas and Oklahoma line in Barber, Harper, Comanche, and Sumner. Drilling has slowed, but the acreage and the existing production are real assets.
Legacy shallow oil across Ellis, Russell, Barton, and Rice. Stripper wells, long lives, and title chains that in many cases have not been touched since the 1950s.
Southeast Kansas coalbed methane and shallow gas, the northern edge of the same geology we work daily in Oklahoma.
Southwest Kansas gas, the Mississippian counties on the Oklahoma line, and the central Kansas oil counties are our focus. We review every Kansas inquiry.
Everything a Kansas 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 Kansas guideEvery oil and gas operator in Kansas, with contact information, refreshed from the state regulator. Free to search, and useful whether or not you ever sell anything.
The things owners here most often wish they had read first. All free, none of it gated.
Free, no obligation, and no pressure. We reply within one business day, usually faster.
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.