Oil, Gas & Mineral Rights
You can own Pennsylvania land and not own the gas under it. I help landowners with leases, royalties, water protection, and inherited mineral rights.
You can own Pennsylvania land and not own the gas under it. I help landowners with leases, royalties, water protection, and inherited mineral rights.
Pennsylvania sits on the Marcellus Shale, and the law that comes with it is its own world: severed estates, century-old deeds, habendum clauses, net-back royalties, and water-supply presumptions. I help landowners understand what they own, what a lease actually does, and whether they are being paid correctly.
Plain-English guides for Pennsylvania landowners, from who owns the gas to what your royalty check should say.
Not necessarily. In Pennsylvania the oil and gas can be a separate estate from the surface. If a prior owner sold or reserved it, someone else may own it even though you own the surface and pay the taxes. And under the Dunham Rule, an old deed that reserves "minerals" usually does not include the oil and gas unless it names them.
No. One-eighth (12.5%) is the legal floor under the Guaranteed Minimum Royalty Act, not a ceiling. You can negotiate more, and in strong markets landowners have signed leases at one-sixth or higher.
Because Pennsylvania values the royalty at the wellhead. Producers may deduct a proportionate share of post-production costs, gathering, compression, processing, and transportation, before they pay, as long as the net still clears one-eighth. Whether your particular clause allows those deductions can be contestable, and one royalty-deduction question is before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court right now.
Maybe. A lease held only "so long as" there is production in paying quantities can end when production stops, but the operator gets the benefit of a good-faith business judgment, and delay rentals alone do not hold it past the primary term. It often takes a quiet-title or contract action to clear a dead lease off your title.
Pennsylvania presumes the operator responsible if your supply sits within 2,500 feet of an unconventional well and the problem appears within 12 months, and the operator must restore or replace it. An independent baseline water test, taken before drilling starts, is what turns that presumption into a claim you can prove.
Oil and gas in the ground are real property and pass by will or intestacy like land, though a royalty under an existing lease can be personal property. Inherited interests are reported on the Pennsylvania inheritance tax return (REV-1500, Schedule E) at date-of-death value. Pennsylvania has no dormant-mineral statute, so the rights do not lapse just from sitting idle.
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