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I believe it was my great-grandparents who sold their farm in Moulton, Texas, but kept the mineral rights, and as a result my father gets some fraction of a fra

I believe it was my great-grandparents who sold their farm in Moulton, Texas, but kept the mineral rights, and as a result my father gets some fraction of a fraction of money out of it. It used to be close to worthless, but something about shale or fracking or other market changes has meant that he actually gets perhaps a few hundred dollars a year out of it now (or at least there was a good year or two in there; I'm not too up on the current state of things). I've never understood how this is supposed to continue - in theory, I'd get a further divide of it, but why would I get some right to go stick oil extraction equipment on some farmer's land because my ancestor lived there a century ago? I don't know how you unwind such a system, but it seems like moving towards thinking of it as a collective resource of the citizens makes some sense, and I'm lead to believe that that's the way it's done in other places like Norway or Alaska.

MandieD 3y ago
Depends on in what form he's making use of them... most small holders end up leasing them to a bigger operator for a set period of time, with a cut to the agent who made the deal happen. Those leases have gotten a lot more lucrative over the past 20 years or so than they were in the 90s. Texas will get state-funded universal healthcare and Tesla will be able to sell you a car right there in downtown Dallas before mineral rights are seriously reformed. For non-Texans: those first two things have two of the more powerful lobbies in Texas against them, but not the even more widely-distributed power of mineral rights holders.
nocoiner 3y ago
Oh boy. You could write a book on mineral rights in Texas. Just kidding - it could fill a library. If you’re interested in knowing more about what your family might own and how this works, happy to take some educated guesses. Just let me know if you’re interested, and I can pose a few general follow up questions to narrow it down. Smart of your great-grandparents though - my west Texan forebearers never retained any mineral rights lmfao. By the way, for what it’s worth, Texas’s public university systems are in large part funded by state-owned mineral rights in West Texas which includes a little oil field called the Permian Basin. As a result, UT’s endowment is either comparable in size, or perhaps now larger than, Harvard’s famously large endowment (that’s what she said?). Obviously smaller on a per capita basis, but definitely the mineral resources of Texas do fund some public goods. Final comment - I can still hear a quote from some game on unlocking part of the tech tree (Civ VI? Alpha Centauri?): “The meek shall inherit the earth - but not its mineral rights.”

MandieD 3y ago

Depends on in what form he's making use of them... most small holders end up leasing them to a bigger operator for a set period of time, with a cut to the agent who made the deal happen. Those leases have gotten a lot more lucrative over the past 20 years or so than they were in the 90s. Texas will get state-funded universal healthcare and Tesla will be able to sell you a car right there in downtown Dallas before mineral rights are seriously reformed. For non-Texans: those first two things have two of the more powerful lobbies in Texas against them, but not the even more widely-distributed power of mineral rights holders.

nocoiner 3y ago

Oh boy. You could write a book on mineral rights in Texas. Just kidding - it could fill a library. If you’re interested in knowing more about what your family might own and how this works, happy to take some educated guesses. Just let me know if you’re interested, and I can pose a few general follow up questions to narrow it down. Smart of your great-grandparents though - my west Texan forebearers never retained any mineral rights lmfao. By the way, for what it’s worth, Texas’s public university systems are in large part funded by state-owned mineral rights in West Texas which includes a little oil field called the Permian Basin. As a result, UT’s endowment is either comparable in size, or perhaps now larger than, Harvard’s famously large endowment (that’s what she said?). Obviously smaller on a per capita basis, but definitely the mineral resources of Texas do fund some public goods. Final comment - I can still hear a quote from some game on unlocking part of the tech tree (Civ VI? Alpha Centauri?): “The meek shall inherit the earth - but not its mineral rights.”