There’s no telling what deals may have been struck. The ranch family, if they’re getting “quite a bit of money every year,” may in fact be royalty owners who owned the mineral rights and leased to the oil company. Same with the church. If they’re also, or just, surface owners, they may be getting annualized damages payments for loss of use, which would make sense for crop lands, for instance.
The mineral owners can do (generally) whatever is necessary to evaluate and extract said minerals. I’ve had to send Sheriff’s Deputies out to escort seismic crews on to recalcitrant ranchers’ lands. It can be made to sound terrible, but the fact of the matter is that you should only do real estate deals with your eyes open. If you buy land with severed minerals, or sell the mineral rights to your land, it is a given that the mineral owners may be along someday to extract their minerals.
That being said, I’m not a landman, and I’ve never worked properties in California. State laws do vary dramatically. We seek to smooth feathers and keep as many people happy as possible, while still exercising our rights. We’re not going to put asunder eight or ten half-million dollar homes to put a rig in. We’ll either kick it over from some undeveloped land nearby or walk on the project. I don’t know (I’ll try to remember to ask a landman tomorrow), but I’d suspect there are laws that would circumscribe the mineral owner’s rights to a degree that would likely put your homestead out of bounds. If there are not, I’d certainly support such sanctions.
And generally speaking, we avoid one acre land deals like we do the plague.
I stand on both sides of the issue. My great-grandfather bought mineral rights to thousands of acres of land in the 1940’s and 1950’s for next to nothing in Texas and Louisiana. That was on my father’s mother’s side of the family. They now have a healthy income stream coming from those wells although it was 10x more in the late 1970’s and early 80’s than it is now.
We built our house on 62 acres of land in 1977 in rural Northwestern Louisiana. We did not own the mineral rights to that land. In 1980, a coal company drilled a test well literally 50 yards from our house in the back yard. It did not produce enough to be used. In 1982, a gas company drilled a test well 200 yards from our house and found a huge reserve. They cleared of 2 and 1/2 acres as their drill site and put up a 100 foot drilling derick that worked 24 hours a day for over a year and flooded our house with bright light. The field was extremely dangerous although I was only 9 years old at the time and loved playing in it. They had a 1/2 acre “slush pit” that they pumped eveything you can imagine into as well as a landscape that looked exactly like the photos that you see of Mars. Now there are two huge storage tanks, a control facility, and two pumps (I don’t know what you call them but they look like a horse 15 feet tall always eating grass and can kill you in less than a second if you get close two then; in fact, I had a friend get his legs chopped off on one on another property when he tried to “ride” it")
As far as I know, we didn’t get a single penny from either of the wells. They were built because someone else owned the mineral rights. That was 22 years ago and the well is still pumping. That is just the way that it works in Louisiana.
A better story, related to the first one, is when a gas company tried to come after my grandmother for extracting free gas to fuel her house. She had been on a free gas line for over 30 years. The gas company eventually found out about this and contacted her about a law-suit. Of course, they had to find the owner of the mineral rights and found out that “SHE OWNED THEM”. They had to pay her a settlement for all the gas extracted since the well was built. It amounted to 10’s of thousands of dollars. She never even knew that her father had bought them.
The old, exhausted oilfields (like Oil Creek Valley, PA. or Spindletop, Texas)…do they refill themselves with time? Is it worthwhile to go back to old, played-out deposits and drill new wells? I also read once that old oil wells can be made to produce by putting down explosives into the well, and detonating them…presumably this frees up the oil.
I don’t know how efficient it would be to drill in a played out field. Not very, probably.
Yes, in fact, one well I own shares in was “gas gunned” on Saturday. Basically, they sent explosives to the bottom and blew them up, hoping to fracture the formation.
Other methods include sending pressurized water down the well, hydrofracturing or just “fracking” the well. Same intent.