Locating Your Mineral Rights on a Map
Know What You Own!
How Do I Locate My Minerals?
If you are like most people who inherit mineral rights , you have no idea where to start looking for information.
You might have inherited it from a relative that kept poor records or perhaps you didn’t even know you owned mineral interest until a landman contacted you, offering to lease your minerals.
Even if you inherited your mineral from a well-organized relative, it’s still new to you and everyone has to start somewhere.
Let’s start by locating the legal description, which will help you find the property on a public GIS viewer. Once you’ve found your property, you can explore the wells in which you own interest as well as the oil and gas activity in the surrounding area.
You might have inherited it from a relative that kept poor records or perhaps you didn’t even know you owned mineral interest until a landman contacted you, offering to lease your minerals.
Even if you inherited your mineral from a well-organized relative, it’s still new to you and everyone has to start somewhere.
Let’s start by locating the legal description, which will help you find the property on a public GIS viewer. Once you’ve found your property, you can explore the wells in which you own interest as well as the oil and gas activity in the surrounding area.
4 Steps to Locating Your Minerals
Once you know the legal description, it's fairly easy to locate the tract of land under which you own mineral rights.
Finding the Legal Description
A legal description is a way of describing the geographical location of a property’s boundaries and is used for real estate transactions, including oil & gas contracts. A legal description is not the same as a property address.
Legal descriptions vary from state to state and can differ greatly when referring to many acres of land or small urban lots.
How Do I Locate the Legal Description?
If you have an interest in a producing oil or gas well, the legal description should be available by:
Legal descriptions vary from state to state and can differ greatly when referring to many acres of land or small urban lots.
How Do I Locate the Legal Description?
If you have an interest in a producing oil or gas well, the legal description should be available by:
Each state’s regulatory agency uses a slightly different GIS viewer but typically, you can look up a property using the legal description.
Using a GIS Viewer
Each state’s regulatory agency uses a slightly different Graphical Information System (GIS) viewer. To find your state’s public GIS viewer, google “[your state] oil and gas GIS”. Or, if your property is located in the top 9 oil and gas producing states, you can find the GIS listed below.
Oil and Gas GIS Viewers all work in the same general way. There should be some way to search based on a combination of the county and the following information from your legal description.
Oil and Gas GIS Viewers all work in the same general way. There should be some way to search based on a combination of the county and the following information from your legal description.
- Range
- Township
- Section
- Block
- Abstract
- API
Once you have located your mineral or royalty interest, it’s easy to see which wells, if any are located in your property, and even the wells and drilling activity in the surrounding area.
You can even overlay this map with geology maps or drilling activity maps to see if your mineral rights are located in an active area.
You can even overlay this map with geology maps or drilling activity maps to see if your mineral rights are located in an active area.
GIS Viewers for the top Oil & Gas Producing States
If your state is not listed here, just google your state plus “oil and gas GIS”.
Mineral Management Spreadsheet
The first and most essential part of owning mineral rights is to know what you own. This should be well documented and organized in both files and a spreadsheet.
Lower your free mineral management spreadsheet.
Want to know more about managing your mineral rights? We have video about the advantages of actively managing your minerals, what documents you should keep, how to organize your files, monthly royalty audits, evaluate mineral management software, and if it's all too overwhelming, how to outsource the management of your mineral rights.
Lower your free mineral management spreadsheet.
Want to know more about managing your mineral rights? We have video about the advantages of actively managing your minerals, what documents you should keep, how to organize your files, monthly royalty audits, evaluate mineral management software, and if it's all too overwhelming, how to outsource the management of your mineral rights.
