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- Title
THE DOMINANT MINERAL ESTATE IN THE HORIZONTAL WELL CONTEXT: TIME TO EXTEND MOSER HORIZONTALLY.
- Authors
Wells, Bret
- Abstract
Today's horizontal wells are radically different in legally relevant ways from traditional vertical wells. Horizontal wells are now being drilled with a horizontal drainhole extending more than a mile away from the drill site. These horizontal wells often have multi-stage completions that allow operators to obtain production from multiple tracts traversed by the horizontal wellbore. From a single surface location, a horizontal well can be fractured in more than twenty-five stages and require the use of up to six million gallons of water per horizontal well. Thus, unlike vertical wells, the surface well site for today's horizontal wells can concentrate numerous separate horizontal wells onto one well site location. Each of these horizontal wells that are concentrated onto this single surface well site in turn can produce from multiple different production points including off-tract production points that are horizontally displaced a great distance away from the surface well site. The servicing work at this concentrated surface well site location, including the handling of millions of gallons of flow-back waste water from the multi-stage hydraulic fracturing required to complete each of these horizontal wells, often is more intensive at this concentrated well site location than what was typically required at a surface site that possessed only a single vertical well drilled in a conventional formation. The Texas Supreme Court signaled in Key Operating & Equipment, Inc. v. Hegar that it is willing to reformulate historic doctrines to better address surface usage issues. As a result, given the Texas Supreme Court's recent statements in Key Operating and Equipment, Inc. v. Hegar, the explosive growth in horizontal drilling in unconventional shale formations, and the Texas Supreme Court's historic willingness to reformulate historic oil and gas doctrines (as evidenced by its opinion in Coastal Oil & Gas v. Garza) to ensure that justice and sound public policy outcomes are achieved, it is appropriate to re-examine the doctrine of the dominant mineral estate to ensure that the manner of its application in the horizontal well context promotes the state's public policy goals of ensuring the efficient development of the state's finite natural resources while, at the same time, affording equitable outcomes to surface owners burdened by these on-site horizontal drilling activities. To this end, in order to better achieve sound public policy outcomes while providing an equitable outcome to surface owners, this Article proposes a new common law principle for horizontal wells and argues that the Texas Supreme Court should adopt it.
- Subjects
HORIZONTAL wells; TEXAS. Supreme Court; GAS well drilling; OIL well drilling; HISTORIC sites
- Publication
Houston Law Review, 2015, Vol 53, Issue 1, p193
- ISSN
0018-6694
- Publication type
Article