In re Shale Oil Antitrust Litigation considers whether the nation’s largest shale producers conspired to restrain domestic shale oil production to artificially increase the price of crude oil and its derivative products throughout the United States. The U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico concluded that the allegations against
If you are the type to be preoccupied with the nuances (drudgery if you prefer) of federal statutory and regulatory interpretation, or if you have a fetish for acronyms, I recommend that you read all 41 spellbinding pages of W&T Offshore v. U S Department of the Interior. The rest of us will dig into
Who owns produced water in Texas? And what is produced water anyway – oil and gas waste and part of the mineral estate, or groundwater and part of the surface estate? We may be closer to an answer to these questions now that the Texas Supreme Court has agreed to hear a
Alas, we might never know. Opiela v. Railroad Commission of Texas and Magnolia Oil & Gas Operating, was a challenge to the Commission’s authority to issue permits for allocation wells and wells drilled under Production Sharing Agreements. The parties have submitted a Joint Unopposed Motion For Reversal and Remand Pursuant to the Parties’ Settlement
If you follow the Texas Railroad Commission closely, you should read Ammonite Oil & Gas v. Railroad Commission of Texas, in which the Supreme Court rejected a mineral owner’s effort to force pool an interest under the Mineral Interest Pooling Act. (Read here for the Austin Court of Appeals ruling and the
The U. S. Supreme Court struck down the “Chevron doctrine” that has plagued the citizenry of our great country since 1984. In Loper Bright Enterprises et al v. Raimondo, the Court ruled that the Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within
It would be a heavy burden to catalogue all of the wrongs one might attribute to our Texas Attorney General. Now, we have another one. Opinion KP-0467, responding to a request from the Texas Real Estate Commission, concluded that a person who negotiates a lease of property for the development of a wind power project
This post is a summary of a more detailed Client Alert prepared by Gray Reed’s labor and employment practice group.
Recall our recent post on the Department of Labor’s new “Economic Realities Test” for classifying specialized contractors and consultants as either employees or independent contractors. The new rules make the compliance minefield much riskier. The
The Department of Labor recently made key changes to its rules in a way that will affect the oil and gas sector. The new rule rescinds a Trump Administration rule that had simplified the process of classifying workers as independent contractors. In its place, the DOL returned to the previous, complex and flexible “Economic Realities Test”
We haven’t presented 2023’s Bad Guys in Energy, but we have SEC v. Bowen, Baker, Cannon Operating and others as an example of garden variety securities fraud. The opinion addresses a defendant’s effort to defeat the SEC’s fraud claim by attacking the complaint. The “bad guys” are only alleged at this point.
Bowen, Baker and