Glossary
ⓘ This section covers essential details about lease contracts, ownership transfers, right-of-way agreements, and Pennsylvania’s unique “split estate” laws.
Understanding Oil and Gas Leases
Oil and gas leases usually refer to a contract between a mineral rights owner and a drilling company that wishes to extract those minerals (such as oil, gas, or other hydrocarbons). Understanding the commitments of these contracts can be difficult in the absence of professional legal assistance. Most leases give drilling companies broad discretion to decide how chemicals and waste will be stored on the property, the ultimate locations of well heads, pipeline routes, and other determining factors that can dramatically affect a landowner’s quality of life. Leases also rarely describe the potential water pollution, air quality impacts, and other risks of extracting oil and gas from the landowner’s property.
The length of oil and gas lease agreements is about five years on average. Typically, if a parcel is not drilled after a certain period of time, then the contract expires. Some leases, however, allow for extensions without the grantor’s approval. In other cases, gas companies use “force majeure” to extend a lease indefinitely by arguing that they were unable to meet the terms of the agreement due to legal or regulatory technicalities beyond their control. Whether it be the case that a landowner does eventually see a well on their property, or that their lease continues beyond their intentions, signing a lease can lead to a long and complicated relationship with the oil and gas industry.
Besides the basic mineral rights contract, the record of ownership associated with a particular parcel can be much more complicated than a single transaction. For instance, mineral rights owners are more often than not approached by “landmen” that represent different consulting firms. One such prominent company in Allegheny County is Huntley & Huntley. Once a land agent (lessee) completes a lease with the mineral rights owner (lessor), the rights can be transferred or “assigned” to a drilling company such as Range Resources, Chesapeake, or EQT. These rights might be assigned yet again to another drilling company as corporations trade their assets over time. Leases can also be extended, terminated, and amended. Other records can denote a right of way, where a landowner agrees to allow a pipeline across their property. Pennsylvania also has what is known as “split estate” where the mineral rights to a property may have been sold decades before the present landowner purchased the property. In this case one might also find deeds documenting the transfer of the surface rights to the property from one person to another.
Legal Terminology
To simplify the many different record types for users of the Allegheny Lease Mapping Project, FracTracker has created six broad categories. Below are descriptions of the record types associated with each of these categories. Click on the example documents under each category to see examples of each record type. FracTracker would like to thank Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services for assisting us with these definitions.
FracTracker found numerous overlaps within different records upon closer inspection of documents. For instance, a “LEASE” record may end up being an O&G lease, whereas other “LEASE” records end up being amendments to an O&G lease. These overlaps lead us to conclude that some records have been incorrectly categorized over the years. To obtain records for a particular parcel, users can click on the link next to the record of interest on the interactive map. This will lead to the record’s page at the Allegheny County Department of Real Estate Office website. Note that some of these records can exceed 10 pages and the county charges a per-page fee.
We have supplied here but a few of the many thousands of documents available in the County’s system in order to provide context to the project. Given that these are all public records, albeit for a fee, we encourage users of the Allegheny Lease Mapping Project to visit the County’s website to become more acquainted with oil and gas records.
