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Comment by ghc | Hacker News Reader

How is it that possessing mineral rights underneath land allows companies to violate land rights by putting their drilling pads on a farmer's land? And how did they buy mineral rights underneath someone's land, anyway? The farmers had to have had some say in such a sale, right?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_rights may help. In particular, selling mineral rights includes selling the right to use as much of the surface as is "reasonably necessary" to get the ore, oil, or whatever.

"energy companies bought "mineral rights" to the land below those farms"

Presumably someone (the farmers?) sold those rights in the past?

In most places mineral rights and land rights are separate. I may own land but if diamonds are found under it by somebody else, I have no particular right to extract them. It appears the US may be different though.

But if I start of owning both the land and the mineral rights, surely I can sell off the mineral rights and continue to "own" and farm the land? It would seem a surpising legal requirement that the land and the mineral rights always remain part of the same item.

[NB I come from somewhere with quite remarkable land ownership issues, so perhaps I'm introducing complexities where they don't exist].

Usually. It depends on the deed titles you possess, which may preclude such actions. Also, sometimes they may not be severable based on jurisdiction.

Well, there are ways around it:

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120427144332/simpson...

Isn't that a real thing though? I thought that slant drilling from Kuwait into a disputed region in Iraq was one of the claimed causes of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

The gov't bodies largely determine the law, so they've determined that the farmer only bought the land above the mineral deposits. ;)

I've looked to buy land in the past and it always said the purchase doesn't include mineral rights. That always seemed pretty sucky to me.

Just offer a lower price, then.

The issue is primarily that mineral rights were sold years ago to acquire the natural gas and coal in the region. We always knew there was oil in Bakken (never this much, though) but couldn't extract it until fracking came along.

The problem comes from a couple of things: First, many farmers rent land. It's the renters who are pissed. Second, those land owners that sold their rights years before fracking lost out quite a bit to what mineral rights are going for now that we can frack the oil out.

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