West Virginia

West Virginia’s mineral ownership fragments with every generation, because when an owner dies without a will the oil and gas passes to the heirs in undivided fractional shares, and after a century of that a single tract beneath a farm can be owned by dozens of cousins scattered across the country, some of them unknown or untraceable.

Until 2018 that arithmetic effectively froze the land: state law treated development by one cotenant without the agreement of all the others as waste, so one holder of a fractional interest, or one heir nobody could find, could block the whole tract.

The Cotenancy Modernization and Majority Protection Act, W. Va. Code § 37B-1-1, changed that from June 2018.

Where a tract has seven or more royalty owners and an operator has made reasonable efforts to negotiate with all of them, written consent from owners of 75 per cent of the development rights is enough to proceed, and non-consenting owners take a pro-rata share of the bonus and royalty or elect a working interest instead.

The legislature broadened it again in 2022 by removing the seven-owner threshold.

A fractional mineral interest can now produce income whether or not every cousin agrees, and a surface parcel may be sold with minerals underneath it that are already leased by people the seller has never met.

A title search here therefore reaches back much further than the deed, and the mineral question is usually settled before the surface one.