Texas Energy Law: Oil, Gas, Mineral, Wind and Solar
A single section of Texas ranchland can carry a producing gas well, a row of wind turbines, a solar array, and a battery storage yard at the same time. Different people own those rights, different contracts govern them, and Texas law does not treat them as equals. That is where most energy disputes in this state begin.
This page covers three bodies of Texas energy law. The first is oil, gas, and mineral law, including who owns a mineral interest, how it passes at death, and what happens when an operator underpays or misreports production. The second is wind energy, which reaches Texas landowners almost entirely through long-term private leases. The third is solar energy and the battery storage projects now built alongside it.
This website provides general information about Texas energy law and does not substitute for advice from an energy lawyer.
CALL 866-474-1477 or CLICK HERE for a free case review by Texas energy lawyer Jason S. Coomer.
Oil, Gas & Mineral Law in Texas
Roughly two thirds of the 254 counties in Texas have produced oil or gas. That production has created several generations of mineral owners, many of whom hold fractional interests they have never seen and cannot easily prove. This section covers six areas where those interests turn into legal problems.
- Mineral interest ownership determines who holds the right to develop, lease, and collect royalty once the mineral estate has been severed from the surface.
- Mineral interest inheritance moves those rights to heirs, and a failure to record the transfer leaves royalties sitting in suspense.
- Oil and gas litigation covers lease disputes, royalty underpayment, improper pooling, and business torts between operators, partners, and investors.
- Oil company fraud reaches production fraud, royalty underreporting, working interest fraud, and false accounting.
- Whistleblower law lets petroleum industry employees report fraud and seek a reward while keeping protection against retaliation.
- Oilfield truck accidents arise from the heavy commercial traffic that drilling and completion work puts on rural Texas roads.
Texas Mineral Interest Ownership Law
Texas allows an owner to split a tract into two estates. The surface estate covers the ground, the buildings, the grass, and the water. The mineral estate covers the oil, gas, and other substances beneath it. Once someone severs the two, they travel through separate chains of title, and a person who buys the surface a century later may own nothing below it.
A full mineral interest carries five rights. The owner can develop the minerals, lease them to an operator, collect the bonus paid for signing that lease, collect delay rentals that keep an undrilled lease alive, and collect royalty on production. Those rights separate. A family can sell the executive right to lease and keep the royalty, or reserve a non-participating royalty interest that pays on production but carries no say in whether a well ever gets drilled. Knowing which of the five sticks you actually hold decides whether an operator has to consult you or merely pay you.
Texas treats the severed mineral estate as the dominant estate. The mineral owner and any lessee may use as much of the surface as is reasonably necessary to produce the minerals, without paying the surface owner for that use. The accommodation doctrine, which the Texas Supreme Court set out in Getty Oil Co. v. Jones in 1971, limits that power. Where a mineral owner has a reasonable alternative on the tract and the surface owner already has an established use that drilling would preclude, the mineral owner has to accommodate it. That doctrine now decides fights that have nothing to do with cattle and irrigation, as the solar section below explains.
All of this runs on county records. Every reservation, deed, probate, and correction that ever touched a mineral estate lives in the deed records of the county where the land sits. Interests get lost when a family stops recording, and they get recovered by running title back through those records. Jason Coomer helps families trace, claim, and protect Texas mineral interests and oil royalties, including interests that have gone unclaimed long enough to end up as unclaimed property.
Texas Mineral Interest Inheritance Law
Mineral interests and oil royalties pass at death like any other real property, by will or under the Texas intestate succession statutes. The problem is not the transfer itself. It is proving the transfer to an operator who will not release money without a document on file in the right county.
What happens to mineral rights when someone dies in Texas?
The interest vests in the heirs or beneficiaries at the moment of death. The operator, however, sees only its own records. Until someone records a probated will, a muniment of title, an order determining heirship, or an affidavit of heirship in the county where the minerals sit, the operator will place the account in suspense and hold the checks. Interests left in suspense for years turn into a title problem for the next generation instead of a payday for this one.
Each generation makes the arithmetic worse. A quarter interest divided among four children becomes a sixteenth. Divided again, it becomes a sixty-fourth spread across cousins who have never met, some of whom live out of state and none of whom know which county to file in. That fragmentation is why a modest royalty check can require a full heirship proceeding to collect.
The route through the Texas probate courts depends on the estate. A valid will can often be admitted as a muniment of title when there are no unpaid debts, which is the fastest path. Without a will, heirs may need a suit to determine heirship or, for smaller estates where everyone agrees, an affidavit of heirship. Once the transfer is on record, the heir sends it to the operator and asks for a corrected division order so future royalties go to the right people. Coomer handles Texas oil royalty and mineral interest inheritance matters statewide, including Eagle Ford Shale inheritance and larger Texas wealth inheritance cases.
Texas Oil & Gas Litigation
Most oil and gas disputes in Texas come down to a document. A lease, a division order, a joint operating agreement, or a purchase and sale agreement says something the parties now read two different ways, and production revenue hangs on the answer.
Royalty underpayment is the most common complaint. Texas Natural Resources Code Section 91.402 sets the deadlines. Proceeds from the first sale of production must reach each payee within 120 days after the end of the month of first sale. After that, absent a different schedule in the lease, oil proceeds come due within 60 days after the end of the month of sale and gas proceeds within 90 days. A payor who blows those deadlines owes interest on the money it held. The same chapter lets a payor require a signed division order before it pays, which is why a royalty owner who refuses to sign often stops receiving checks.
Deductions cause the harder fights. Texas courts read royalty valuation language closely and give the words their ordinary meaning. In Heritage Resources v. NationsBank, decided in 1996, the Texas Supreme Court held that a royalty valued at the well allows the operator to deduct post-production costs, and that additional language forbidding deductions did not change the outcome. Burlington Resources v. Texas Crude Energy in 2019 treated an overriding royalty delivered into the pipeline the same way. Nettye Engler Energy v. BlueStone Natural Resources II in 2022 allowed deductions for costs incurred downstream of the gathering system at the wellsite, even though the deed called for delivery free of cost in the pipe line. A few words in the valuation clause decide millions of dollars, so a royalty owner who suspects overdeduction needs the lease and the check detail reviewed together.
Beyond royalties, these cases involve improper pooling, failure to develop a leasehold, disputes over lease termination and continuous drilling clauses, working interest accounting under a joint operating agreement, and business torts between partners. Coomer litigates Texas oil and gas business disputes, including trade secret theft, breach of fiduciary duty, fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation, unfair competition, and the recovery of partnership assets.
Oil Company Fraud
Fraud in the oil patch usually hides inside numbers that royalty owners never see. The operator reports what it produced, what it sold it for, and what it cost to get the product to market. A royalty owner sitting three counties away has no independent way to check any of it.
The recurring patterns include underreporting volumes, misallocating production between wells or leases, selling to an affiliate at a discount and paying royalty on that lower price, inflating post-production costs, and simply omitting an owner from the division of interest. Working interest owners face a parallel set of problems in joint interest billings, where an operator charges expenses that never touched the well. Investors get a third version, where a promoter sells fractional interests in wells that were never drilled or were drilled with someone else's money.
Forcing an accounting of production is the usual first step. A careful review of division orders, run tickets, purchaser statements, and Railroad Commission of Texas production records will often show the gap between what came out of the ground and what the owner received. Coomer represents royalty owners, working interest owners, and shareholders in Texas oil production and royalty fraud matters, oil company royalty underreporting claims, oil investment fraud cases, and broader Texas oil company fraud litigation.
Oil & Gas Whistleblower Law
The people best positioned to expose energy fraud work inside the companies committing it. Accountants, land administrators, revenue analysts, engineers, and compliance officers see the entries that outsiders never will. Several federal programs pay them for coming forward and protect them if the company retaliates.
The federal False Claims Act covers fraud against the government, which in this industry most often means underreporting royalties owed on federal and state leases. A whistleblower files under seal, the government decides whether to intervene, and a successful case pays the relator a share of the recovery. Section 3730(h) of the Act protects an employee from being fired, demoted, or harassed for lawful acts done to stop a violation.
Other programs reach conduct that never touches a government royalty check. The Securities and Exchange Commission pays for original information about securities fraud, which in energy cases often means overstated reserves or false production reporting to investors. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission covers manipulation of oil, gas, and power markets. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act reaches bribes paid to foreign officials for concessions and permits, a recurring problem for companies operating abroad. The Internal Revenue Service runs its own program for tax fraud.
Timing and originality matter more in these cases than in almost any other area of law, because the first person through the door with genuinely new information is often the only one who gets paid. Coomer handles petroleum employee whistleblower matters, oil company accounting fraud claims brought by industry accountants, and whistleblower reward lawsuits across other industries.
Oil Truck Accidents
Drilling a single well takes hundreds of truck trips. Sand, water, pipe, cement, rig components, and produced fluids all move by road, much of it over two-lane county roads built for pickups and cattle trailers. When activity surges in the Permian Basin or the Eagle Ford Shale, the crash rate on those roads climbs with it.
These cases rarely stop at the driver. Liability can reach the trucking company that hired a driver with a bad record, the operator that pressed an unrealistic schedule, the broker that arranged the haul, and the maintenance contractor that signed off on the equipment. Driver qualification files, hours of service logs, dispatch records, and electronic control module data disappear on a schedule, so preserving them early often decides the case. Coomer handles Texas oil truck accident lawsuits and works with counsel in other states on interstate trucking claims.
Contact the Law Offices of Jason S. Coomer
Jason Coomer, a Texas energy attorney, and his team represent mineral owners, royalty owners, landowners, investors, and energy industry employees in disputes across the oil, gas, wind, and solar sectors.
Get In TouchWind Energy in Texas
Texas produces more wind power than any other state, and almost none of it sits on public land. Developers reach Texas wind through private leases signed with ranchers and farmers, many of whom negotiated the most consequential contract of their lives across a kitchen table with a land agent who does this for a living.
Texas Wind Energy Farms
A wind project arrives in stages. A land agent signs options across a broad area, sometimes years before anyone decides where turbines will stand. The developer studies the wind resource with meteorological towers, secures a position in the transmission interconnection queue, and lines up financing and a power purchase agreement. Only then does the project convert options into operating leases and begin construction.
What lands on the ground is more than turbines. A utility-scale project brings access roads, buried collection lines, crane pads, a substation, transmission, and an operations building. Roads and pads take productive acreage out of use permanently, and the collection line easements crisscross fields in ways that complicate irrigation and tillage for decades.
Texas has no statewide siting permit for wind projects. Counties in Texas hold limited land use authority and cannot zone outside city limits, so the setbacks, noise limits, and shadow flicker protections that other states impose by regulation exist in Texas only if a landowner writes them into the lease. That gap puts the entire burden of protection on the contract.
Texas Wind Energy Leases
Compensation in a wind lease arrives in layers. During the option and development period the developer typically pays a small annual amount per acre. Once turbines operate, payment shifts to a production-based formula, calculated per turbine or as a percentage of gross revenue, usually with a minimum annual payment as a floor. How the lease defines gross revenue matters as much as the percentage, because a definition that permits deductions for transmission, curtailment, or marketing costs quietly shrinks every check.
Several other terms decide the value of the deal over its life.
- Term length, which often runs 30 to 50 years once extensions are counted, plus how and when the developer may extend.
- Escalation, since a rate fixed in 2026 dollars with no annual increase erodes badly across four decades.
- The scope of the grant, meaning whether the developer takes rights over the whole tract or only the turbine and road footprint, along with any exclusivity that blocks a future solar or storage lease.
- Assignment and change of control, because the counterparty that signs is rarely the one still holding the lease in year twenty.
- Surface protections covering roads, gates, cattle guards, drainage, weed control, fence repair, and payment for crop and grazing loss.
- Audit rights, which are the only practical way to verify a revenue-share payment.
- Confidentiality, which developers use to keep neighbors from comparing terms.
Removal and Financial Assurance Under Texas Utilities Code Chapter 301
The Texas Legislature addressed the end of a wind project's life in 2019. Chapter 301 of the Texas Utilities Code applies to wind power facility agreements entered into on or after September 1, 2019, and it requires terms that the parties cannot waive.
The agreement must make the grantee responsible for removing its wind power facilities from the property. It must also require the grantee to obtain and deliver evidence of financial assurance to the landowner securing that removal obligation, no later than the tenth anniversary of the wind power operation date. Acceptable forms include a parent company guaranty backed by an investment grade credit rating from a major domestic rating agency, a letter of credit, a bond, or another form the landowner finds acceptable. The grantee cannot cancel that assurance before finishing removal unless it hands the landowner replacement assurance at the same time.
Those protections apply by statute. Everything else in a wind lease is negotiable, and a landowner who treats the statutory floor as the whole of their protection gives up the terms that actually determine what the project pays and what it leaves behind.
Wind Leases and Existing Mineral Rights
A surface owner can sign a wind lease and still watch a drilling rig arrive. Where the mineral estate has been severed, it remains dominant, and the mineral owner's lessee holds the right to use as much of the surface as is reasonably necessary to produce oil and gas. Turbines, roads, and collection lines do not subordinate that right.
Developers know this, which is why the lease almost always obligates the surface owner to help obtain mineral owner waivers, surface use agreements, or subordination agreements before construction. Those documents ask the mineral owner to give up or rank behind rights that Texas law otherwise hands them for free. A mineral owner presented with one deserves separate counsel, because signing it can foreclose development and reduce the value of the mineral interest permanently.
Fractional and absentee mineral ownership makes this harder in practice. A project may need waivers from two dozen cousins scattered across several states, some of whom cannot be located and some of whom hold interests that were never properly recorded. Title work that a family postponed for forty years suddenly has a deadline.
Solar Energy in Texas
Solar has moved fast in Texas. The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts that solar generation on the ERCOT grid will reach 78 billion kilowatt hours in 2026 against 60 billion for coal, the first year solar has passed coal in the state. Texas accounts for roughly 40 percent of planned utility-scale solar additions nationwide this year, and it entered 2026 with about 13.9 gigawatts of operating battery storage, more than California.
For landowners that growth arrives as a lease offer, often on land that has never generated income beyond grazing or dryland crops.
Texas Solar Energy Farms
Solar projects want different land than wind projects do. A developer looks for large contiguous acreage with gentle slope, good drainage, proximity to a substation with available capacity, and a clean title picture. Where a wind project can work around a scattered footprint, a solar array covers nearly everything inside its fence.
That density changes what the lease has to address. Grading and topsoil disturbance affect the land's future productivity. Fencing and stormwater controls change drainage patterns for neighbors as well as the host. Construction traffic tears up county roads, and counties increasingly ask developers to sign road maintenance agreements before work starts.
Tax treatment also shifted. The Chapter 313 school value limitation program that supported a generation of Texas renewable projects expired at the end of 2022, and its replacement under Chapter 403 excludes renewable generation. Landowners hearing promises about local tax arrangements should confirm what the developer is actually able to deliver.
Texas Solar Energy Leases
Solar leases usually pay rent per acre rather than a share of revenue, which makes the acreage definition and the escalator the two numbers that matter most. Several other provisions decide whether the deal serves the landowner.
- The option period, which can tie land up for three to seven years at low rent while the developer chases interconnection, with extension rights that stretch it further.
- Whether rent steps up at construction and again at commercial operation, and what the landowner receives if the project never gets built.
- Compensation for crop and grazing loss during construction, which is heavier and longer for solar than for wind.
- Topsoil, grading, and drainage obligations, along with the condition the land must be returned in.
- Fencing, gates, weed control, and access for the landowner's remaining operations.
- Assignment, financing liens, and lender protections, which often let a lender step in and cure on the developer's behalf.
Removal and Financial Assurance Under Texas Utilities Code Chapter 302
Chapter 302 of the Texas Utilities Code does for solar what Chapter 301 does for wind, with tighter specifications. A solar power facility agreement must make the grantee responsible for removing the facilities, and the statute spells out what removal means. The grantee has to clear, clean, and remove each solar energy device, transformer, and substation, and take foundations out of the ground to a depth of at least three feet below the surface grade.
On financial assurance, the grantee must obtain and deliver evidence of it to the landowner no later than the twentieth anniversary of the commercial operations date, in the same forms Chapter 301 allows for wind. The grantee also has to deliver an updated estimate of removal cost and salvage value on or before the tenth anniversary of the commercial operations date, then at least once every five years after that for the rest of the term. The grantee pays for obtaining the assurance and for preparing those estimates.
Solar Leases and Mineral Rights After Lyle v. Midway Solar
The clearest Texas decision on solar and minerals came out of Pecos County. In Lyle v. Midway Solar, LLC, the Lyle family held 27.5 percent of the mineral estate under a 315-acre tract by virtue of a 1948 deed. No mineral lease covered the property, the Lyles had commissioned no geological work, and they had no drilling contracts. Midway built a solar array across roughly 70 percent of the surface without obtaining a waiver from them, setting aside two designated drill site areas at the north and south ends.
The Lyles sued, arguing that the array had effectively locked them out of their own minerals. The El Paso Court of Appeals disagreed. It held that the accommodation doctrine did apply in principle, but that the Lyles had no claim unless and until they actually attempted to develop the mineral estate. The Texas Supreme Court denied review, leaving the decision standing.
Two lessons follow, and they point in opposite directions. A mineral owner who stays quiet keeps the doctrine in reserve and can invoke it later when a genuine development plan exists. A mineral owner who signs a waiver or a subordination agreement in exchange for a payment gives that protection away permanently. Developers ask for those signatures precisely because Lyle left the question open until development begins, and they prefer certainty to a fight in year fifteen.
Battery Storage Leases and Texas Utilities Code Chapter 303
Battery energy storage now shows up on its own leases and as an add-on to existing solar sites. Texas regulated those agreements in 2025 through House Bill 3809, which Governor Abbott signed on May 29, 2025 and which took effect September 1, 2025 as Chapter 303 of the Texas Utilities Code.
Chapter 303 requires decommissioning of the storage facility and financial assurance running to the landowner, due by the earlier of the lease termination date or the fifteenth anniversary of the battery operation date. That is a shorter runway than solar, which gets twenty years, and longer than wind, which gets ten. The acceptable forms track the earlier statutes, covering an investment grade parent guaranty, a letter of credit, a bond, or another form reasonably acceptable to the landowner.
The restoration provisions go further than either earlier chapter. If the landowner asks within 180 days after receiving notice that the lessee intends to permanently cease operations or decommission the project, the lessee must remove roads, extract rocks 12 inches or larger in diameter, refill excavations, restore the grade, and return the land to a tillable state. Any lease provision attempting to waive Chapter 303 is void and unenforceable, and a landowner facing a violation can seek injunctive relief along with other remedies.
House Bill 3228 from the same session added recycling requirements touching storage, solar, and wind facilities. Landowners signing a storage lease should read both alongside the contract.
What the 2025 Texas Legislature Changed
Anyone researching Texas renewable energy law will run into coverage of Senate Bill 819 from the 89th Legislature. It is worth understanding what happened, because the reporting often stops halfway.
SB 819 would have created a siting regime for new or expanded wind and solar facilities of 10 megawatts or more, requiring a permit from the Public Utility Commission of Texas before interconnection, minimum setbacks from property lines and habitable structures absent written waivers from neighbors, an environmental impact review involving the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and a new annual environmental impact fee. The Senate passed it 22 to 9 in April 2025. The House never brought it up, and it died when the deadline passed. Senate Bills 388 and 715 died alongside it.
Texas therefore still has no statewide siting permit for wind or solar. What did pass in 2025 was House Bill 3809 and House Bill 3228, both of which regulate what happens at the end of a project rather than whether it gets built.
Why Choose Jason Coomer for Your Texas Energy Case
Texas energy law rewards people who understand how the pieces connect. A royalty dispute often turns out to be an inheritance problem that nobody recorded. A wind lease negotiation stalls because a mineral interest split into fractions three generations ago. A whistleblower case starts with an accountant who noticed the same discrepancy a royalty owner has been complaining about for years. Jason Coomer has spent his career on all of those, representing mineral owners, royalty owners, landowners, investors, and industry employees rather than the operators across the table.
In beginning a review of any energy matter, we need to know the complete names of all interested parties, including heirs, beneficiaries, co-owners, and any operator or developer involved, to avoid any potential conflict. Additionally, upon receipt of an inquiry and after a conflict check is successfully completed, we will send questions that we need answered to review your case. Please do not send AI generated reports prior to the conflict check and initial questions being answered and completed.
CALL 866-474-1477 or CLICK HERE for a free case review by Texas energy lawyer Jason S. Coomer.
Frequently Asked Questions About Texas Energy Law
What is energy law in Texas?
Texas energy law covers the ownership, leasing, production, and sale of energy resources across the state, along with the disputes those arrangements produce. It reaches oil, gas, and mineral interests, royalty and lease disputes, production and accounting fraud, whistleblower reward claims, and the wind, solar, and battery storage agreements that developers sign with landowners. Because one Texas tract can carry a producing well, a wind lease, and a solar lease at the same time, the field also covers conflicts between the surface estate and the mineral estate.
Who owns the mineral rights to my property in Texas?
Owning the surface of a Texas tract does not mean you own what lies beneath it. Texas law lets an owner sever the mineral estate from the surface and sell or reserve it separately, and once that happens the two estates follow separate chains of title. To find out who holds the minerals under your land, someone has to run the title back through the deed records in the county where the property sits, tracing every reservation, conveyance, and probate that touched the mineral estate. A title search or a landman's runsheet is the usual starting point.
What happens to mineral rights when someone dies in Texas?
Mineral interests and oil royalties pass at death the same way other real property does, by will or by intestate succession. The interest belongs to the heirs or beneficiaries from the moment of death, but no operator will move the money until the transfer appears in the public record of the county where the minerals sit. Until an heir records a probated will, an order determining heirship, or an affidavit of heirship, royalty payments often sit in suspense with the operator.
How do I transfer inherited mineral rights in Texas?
Start with a document that proves ownership, then record it in the county where the minerals are located. With a will, that usually means probating it or admitting it as a muniment of title. Without a will, the options include a suit to determine heirship or an affidavit of heirship under the Texas Estates Code, depending on the size of the estate and whether the heirs agree. Once the transfer is on record, you send it to the operator and ask for a corrected division order so future royalties go to you. A Texas oil royalty inheritance lawyer can handle both halves of that process.
How long does an oil company have to pay royalties in Texas?
Under Texas Natural Resources Code Section 91.402, proceeds from the first sale of production must reach each payee within 120 days after the end of the month of that first sale. After that, unless the lease sets a different schedule, oil proceeds are due within 60 days after the end of the calendar month of sale and gas proceeds within 90 days. A payor who misses those deadlines owes interest on the late amount, and the statute allows a payor to require a signed division order before it pays.
What is a division order, and do I have to sign one?
A division order is a document from the operator or purchaser stating your decimal share of production from a well, along with your identity and payment details. Texas law lets a payor require a signed division order as a condition of payment, so refusing to sign can stall your checks. A division order does not amend your lease, and you should never treat it as a place to renegotiate terms. Check the decimal against your own title work before signing, because an error there repeats on every check that follows.
Can an oil company deduct post-production costs from my royalty?
In Texas the lease language controls, and courts read it closely. In Heritage Resources v. NationsBank, the Texas Supreme Court held that a royalty valued at the well permits deductions for costs incurred after production, and that added no-deduction wording did not change the result. Burlington Resources v. Texas Crude Energy treated delivery into the pipeline the same way, and Nettye Engler Energy v. BlueStone Natural Resources allowed deductions downstream of the gathering system on the wellsite. Small differences in valuation wording decide these disputes, so a royalty owner who suspects overdeduction should have the lease and the check detail reviewed together.
How much do wind farms pay Texas landowners?
Payment usually arrives in stages rather than as a single number. A developer often pays a modest annual amount per acre during the option and development period, then switches to production-based compensation once turbines run, calculated per turbine or as a percentage of gross revenue with a stated minimum annual payment. Escalators, term length, and how the lease measures gross revenue matter more to lifetime value than the headline rate. Because Texas wind leases are private contracts and often carry confidentiality clauses, comparable numbers are hard to verify without counsel who has seen other agreements in the same project area.
What should a Texas landowner check before signing a wind or solar lease?
Look past the rent. Check how long the option period runs and what happens if the developer never builds, whether the grant covers your whole tract or only the project footprint, who may take assignment of the lease, and what the developer owes you for roads, drainage, fences, and crop or grazing loss. Then confirm the removal and financial assurance terms required by Texas Utilities Code Chapter 301 for wind and Chapter 302 for solar. Those statutory protections apply to qualifying agreements and cannot be waived, but the surrounding business terms are yours to negotiate.
Can a wind or solar lease conflict with existing mineral rights in Texas?
Yes, and this is the issue landowners most often miss. When the mineral estate has been severed, it is the dominant estate, which gives the mineral owner and their lessee the right to use as much of the surface as is reasonably necessary to produce oil and gas. Panels and turbines do not change that. In Lyle v. Midway Solar, the El Paso Court of Appeals held that the accommodation doctrine gave mineral owners no claim until they actually tried to develop, and the Texas Supreme Court denied review. Developers frequently ask a surface owner to obtain waivers or subordination from the mineral owners, and a mineral owner who signs one gives up protection the doctrine would otherwise supply.
CALL 866-474-1477 or CLICK HERE for a free case review by Texas energy lawyer Jason S. Coomer.
