Posted on 04/29/2015 2:02:33 PM PDT by 4yearlurker
I live in SW Pennsylvania and there are many fracking drilling sites going up all around me. I talk about it to folks I know and I always hear the same question:"do you have mineral rights?" I have been paying a mortgage for 23 years and my mortgage statement only has one line about that. It reads "The Pittsburgh vein of coal with mining rights is excepted and reserved." So,do I have mineral rights for gas wells or no rights just for coal? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
You need to go to the county courthouse and research the title to your property.
You need a lawyer on this one. It depends in part on what your deed says, and also whether there have been any grants or reservation of mineral rights to which your property is subject. It sounds like from the language of your mortgage that there are others who may presently have mineral rights in your property, but I am not a Pennsylvania lawyer.
Locate and examine your *deed*.
Don’t know how they do it in PA; in TX your deed (filed as a public record) will show what mineral rights you do and don’t own. Also it should reference any leases currently outstanding.
A title report should list any rights that others have on your propery.
quote “The Pittsburgh vein of coal with mining rights is excepted and reserved”
It doesn’t look like you do. Actually it would be fairly unusual to own the mineral rights to any land you buy these days.
In most cases the minerals were seperated from the surface property LONG ago.
My wife and I are both from “old Texas” families and both have minerals rights in West Texas that have been passed down from when our families first homesteaded it back in the 1800’s.
Look on your property title search documents.
It’s amazing what’s on them.
I have rights to everything on and below my property. The previous owner even negotiated a lease agreement with the power company for the utility pole in the back corner of my lot. I’m supposed to get $12 per year from them as rent for the land the pole is on. I’ve had this property for 36 years and they’ve never paid once, but if they ever cut my power, then I’ll serve an eviction notice and chainsaw the damn thing down.
I drink your milkshake...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_hFTR6qyEo
The exception would be if you have active wells on the property currently.
I have noticed the same thing with trees. Most property in a given area sells for about the same price per acre with or without trees... you could buy a 1000 acres of forest, sell all the lumber to a lumber company, clean up the mess, and sell the land for about what you bought it for when it still had trees on it. I suggested to my wife we start doing that and repeating the process, but she called me the once-ler and wanna be pillager of the planet.
Which sort of discouraged me :/
You don’t know until you know.
It seems to me that if you DON’T have mineral rights, a certain portion of your Mortgage payments would be directed to the party that does.
In a number of states people have been able to “insert” themselves into what is called “Ground Rights/rents” or “Land Rents”.
They actually make money from this, lots of very small payments on hundreds of properties.
I knew a guy that owned hundreds of “Ground rents” in Baltimore and was collecting tens and tens of Thousands.
My family owned land in the Cuyahoga Valley that was bought by the govt. We retained mineral rights, The only way we can get to the gas that is there, is by drilling from outside the Park. But were on the very East edge of the Park, and this is a possibility. One company interested.
Call your closing attorney. He/she will be able to look at your title and explain your rights.
“It seems to me that if you DON’T have mineral rights, a certain portion of your Mortgage payments would be directed to the party that does.”
that will never happen.
mineral rights, whether in the eyes of a mortgager or a tax assessor have zero value unless there are proven reserves on that property.
Where mineral exploitation is active, most operators will deem of value property where reserves could potentially be found, and will pay bonuses for those mineral rights.
If the deed is specificly excepting rights to a “coal” seam... IT IS NOT NECESSARILY conveying ALL mineral rights to other parties. Speak to a lawyer. And for the record... even though you are in SW PA... do NOT do business with Bill Bevivino, Esq. in Warren, PA.
The small county next to me is considered to be "mined out". It still holds over a billion tons of known reserves of "Pittsburgh" coal. But it is not feasible to mine due to its depth.
The lawyer said that didn't matter. I see it as breaking the lease agreement.
For closing on the farm I retained the same lawyer... he basically did noting because I had already done all the deed searching to find out what was what... and he returned nothing new to me. I asked over and over again about the utility crossings on the parcel (local electric power utility, and also a high tension line crossing), and he gave me nothing.
After closing, I came to find out that he didn't bother to contact these lease holders on my behalf and transfer these agreements to my name. The former property owners were still getting the checks, I suppose. I asked this cocksucker lawyer if he really felt that he was serving his clients best interests in not taking care of this AT CLOSING, and he just fast-talked a bunch of BS.
I guess it is my own fault for not demanding a contract for completing the closing fully, read as: to my satisfaction.
Basically, I should have done all of this myself... I mean, in the end that is what I am doing... but the scumbag lawyer got his fee outta me. Needless to say I have very little use for lawyers.
It's the only thing I hold agains Mark Levin and Ted Cruz... that they are lawyers.
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