Co-author Chance Decker
Private property rights advocates scored a big victory in a Texas condemnation case in the ongoing battle between pipelines and landowners over the power of eminent domain. (See our last post for a decision with the opposite result).
An appeals court in Crosstex NGL Pipeline, LP v. Reins Road Farms, Ltd. denied
Co-author Chance Decker
Two recent cases from the same Texas court reflect the ongoing uncertainty over the threat to private property rights posed by the Keystone XL and other pipelines. Is there a theme, a common thread, running through law on this subject? Not in Texas. Today we discuss one of these decisions, Next time
I spent the better part of last week surrounded by foreigners … which is to be expected because I was in a foreign country, the Netherlands to be precise. Looper Reed has joined First Law International, a consortium of select, highly-rated law firms in over 45 countries, assembled to give businesses in one country,
The short answer is no, according to the American Petroleum Institute. The API compared oil and gas to other industries in terms of profit margin and effective tax rate. The oil and gas industry-wide profit margin is 7.3%, which is lower than manufacturing (8.6%), computers and peripherals (9.7%), pharmaceuticals (16.0%) and beverage and tobacco
A Louisiana lessee does not owe its lessor royalties based on hedging profits, said a federal district court in Cimarex Energy Co. v. Chastant. Cimarex, the lessee, hedged its gas contracts and didn’t pay its lessor, Chastant, earnings from the hedge.
As the court described it, hedging involves buying and selling financial positions as
Jesse Jenkins of the Energy Collective ponders the question. He reports as follows:
This is a tale of two regulatory schemes.
First, there is the federal way, and I’m not making this up: In my last post we learned that if the BLM, when preparing its PRMP/FEIS (which in some incomprehensible way is different from a PRMP/EIS, but which nevertheless includes an RFD) which is issued by an
In an opinion with as many acronyms as the Dallas Cowboys have draft-pick detractors, a California federal court in 
Center For Biological Diversity v. Bureau of Land Management, held that the BLM violated the National Environmental Policy Act in its assessment of oil and gas leases on federal lands in California. A “FONSI” –
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Or, as said by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, “A rule of property long acquiesced in should not be overthrown except for compelling reasons of public policy or the imperative demands of justice.” There were no such imperatives in Butler vs. Charles Powers Estate, in which the Court
The Texas Railroad Commission is going through the Sunset review required every 10 years for all state agencies. If approved, the pending legislation (House Bill 2166) would:
A New Name
• Change the name of the agency to the Texas Energy Resources Commission.
Campaign Finance Reform
• Limit the ability of commissioners and