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“It was quiet and peaceful when we moved in, but by the time we decided to move last March, there were 24 gas wells within a mile radius of our house,” Ms. Utesch said.
The couple was helpless to stop the encroachment because they did not own the mineral rights to their land. So-called split estates, where ownership of the land does not include whatever bounty (gas, oil, gold, uranium, etc.) lies beneath it, are common in the United States.
“Often the landowner doesn’t know that they don’t own the mineral rights until the oil company shows up to start drilling,” said John S. Lowe, professor of energy law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Real estate agents rarely address the matter, he said, “and most people anxious to close on a home don’t read the fine print of the deed.”
They should, because the law in most states allows whoever owns or leases mineral rights to do whatever is “reasonably necessary” to extract subterranean riches. As Ms. Utesch can attest, this includes not only digging wells but also running roads and pipelines across a yard as well as setting up housing for employees at the well site. Ms. Utesch said that she barely broke even on her house when she sold it and would probably have made money if the drillers hadn’t shown up, because nearby real estate prices were rising rapidly. The man who bought her house, she said, builds custom-made jeeps and trucks with large wheels, and saw the gas well workers as potential customers.