Mineral Rights Question?

[Martinjmpr]

Correct me if I am wrong, but even if you don't own the mineral rights, you would still own the property.

Thus a 3rd party owning the mineral rights would have to lease/buy permission from you (the property owner) for egress/ingress, equipment storage (oil derrick, etc. ) , and anything else they needed that required access to your property so they could extract their minerals located under your property.

So if oil was found on your property, you could likely work out a deal for you to lease them access to your property, let them deal with extracting the oil, and perhaps require a royalty per barrel.
In a way, they do all the work, and you collect a check.

However, if they had access to the bordering property, I think they could drill from there, at an angle, and extract oil from under your property.

(I ask that someone with more first hand experience please comment on this...I don't want to mislead the OP.)

Nope, not true. Mineral rights are senior to surface rights. They can take the minerals without the permission of the surface owner. They can also use a reasonable amount of the surface in order to do it and they don't have to pay a dime to the surface estate owner.

Now, what I just said above is the strictest interpretation of the law and in the real world, most mineral estate owners are smart enough to know that it's better to get the surface estate owner on your side than it is to make an enemy of him. So in most cases they'll make arrangements for what they need and pay for any damage they cause. They might even pay a leasing fee although they don't have to. The reason they'll do that is that it's cheaper in the long run to do that than it is to spend $$$ fighting lawsuits.

As for water, water is not part of the mineral estate, it is part of the surface estate and is governed by the principles of water law, which are generally 'prior appropriation' , i.e. first to use = senior.

My understanding is that most lands in the West, especially small parcels, are split estate with one owner owning the surface estate and another (sometimes the Federal government) owning the mineral estate. It all depends on when and how the land was patented, that is, how it passed from Federal to Private ownership.