Spanish land grant minerals lease/royalties

Someone recenlty told me about some land they have on a Spanish land grant. The land doesn't have a township range section on Sonris. They know how many acres they have but don't understand how the O&G companies will divide royalties. How does leasing/royalties work in these areas?

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Permalink Reply by Dion Warr, CPL on December 8, 2008 at 3:41
Hmmm...

6000 acres. Would these be the La Nana grants?
Permalink Reply by Dion Warr, CPL on December 8, 2008 at 4:08
As others have said, the entirety of LA has been divided into townships. Section numbers were assigned based upon the standard Jeffersonian model (One township = square being 6 miles on a side, 36 square miles per township). However, possessors of land grants at the time of statehood were granted a period of time to come forward and 'prove' their grants to the Surveyors General (and sometimes by Act of Congress). If the grant was accepted, then its boundaries would be surveyed into and placed in the normal "grid" when the Township was formally surveyed. Of course this process took decades to accomplish, due to difficulties in terrain, revisions and refinements of various townships having to be made due to mistakes, river course changes, etc.

The Louisiana State Land Office (SLO) has a wonderful website on which you can do very in-depth research from your desktop (although having a broadband connection helps immensely).

Many of the Spanish land grants (many of which along the Sabine, the Red, and various major tributaries in the "No Man's Land" area west of the Red River and Mermentau) were quite large (The Las Ormigas grants took up over a couple hundred thousand acres in NW LA), and have been conventionally divided into sections over the decades and accepted to the extent that the old Tobin Land Surveys show the 'sections' more or less as being in general use. However, the US Township Plats still shown them as divided into Lots of much larger sizes being divided amongst the various shareholders in the House of Barr and Davenport.

As far as unitization goes, in general, after the Office of Conservation determines the unit spacing (and therefore unit size) in a field, the spacing is more or less conserved; in North Louisiana, one encounters predominately geographic spacing based upon governmental section lines (or quarter lines, or quarter-quarter lines). By extending the field into a land grant area, generally the units are formed on more or less the same framework as if the sectional boundaries extended over the land grant (see Elm Grove and Caspiana Fields for instance, where 640 acre "squares" have been extended over the Red River in a more or less regular fashion, L&E some accommodations for infill drilling units and township boundary offsets).
Permalink Reply by The_Baron on December 11, 2008 at 17:41
Thank you Dion.

It should also be noted that there is no rule that requires units to be a full section.

Sections are usually units in North LA because it is easy. South LA is another story.
Permalink Reply by Dion Warr, CPL on December 15, 2008 at 5:45
Baron:

Agreed. The predilection to making oil and gas grow in squares and rectangles is a wonderful yarn told all across North LA. The 'Patch' is replete with all sorts of wonderful shapes based upon the subsurface geology, not governmental subdivisions of land, but we in S LA have our share of squares and rectangles, too. Every so often you come across reservoir-based units (Lisbon, Cotton Valley, and Cadeville fields come to mind), but much of it is unitized in quarters, and halves, and full sections.
Permalink Reply by The_Baron on December 15, 2008 at 6:03
Very true Dion, I have to admit that my experiance in S LA is somewhat limited, but much of what I have done involves geologic units. The point I was trying to make was that units around the red River may not nessarally be the cute little 640 acre square.
Permalink Reply by Dion Warr, CPL on December 15, 2008 at 7:55
Oops... didn't properly finish my thought above, the sentence that starts 'Every so often..." was referring to N LA reservoir (geologic) units that I have run across.

I think another factor that has contributed to the S LA preference for geologic units is the fact that there are so many irregular-shaped sections in S LA, with all the land grant sections in many of the townships. North Louisiana parish Tobins look more or less like regular Jeffersonian township grids with few exceptions, those particularly are located along some of the early historically and commercially significant waterways. In S LA, there are so many early waterway frontages that were meted out by land grants that it appears in many parish Tobins that the Jeffersonian section "grid" is merely relegated to filling in the gaps not covered by land grants. The old water frontage land grant properties (some commonly up to 80 arpents in depth) in large oil and gas fields pass through multiple units, even with 'squares and rectangles'. It is interesting how the S LA/N LA mindset diverged historically with respect to unit formation.
Permalink Reply by The_Baron on December 15, 2008 at 8:19
Dion, the S LA/N LA mindsets diverge all the time in every possible issue from oil and gas to what's for dinner.

The reporting requirments in South La are not even the same for LOC as in the shreveport district.
Permalink Reply by Dion Warr, CPL on December 15, 2008 at 10:48
Baron: S LA says: Tastes great!

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