22-0878·Petition For Review
- Absent an agreement otherwise, the surface owner, not the mineral owner, owns the empty underground space left by salt mining, and the mineral owner may use that space only as reasonably necessary to produce its minerals, not to store hydrocarbons produced off-site; the Court overruled Mapco v. Carter to the extent inconsistent.
- Read as a whole, the 1947 mineral deed and correction deed reserved to the surface owner an in-kind royalty of one-eighth of the salt produced, not merely one-eighth of its market value, so the lower courts' royalty calculation was wrong and the case is remanded.
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23-0384·Petition For Review
- Courts may not blue-pencil words into a contract: the trial court erred by adding "scheduled" and "physical" to Section 9.1 of a firm gas-balancing agreement, whose plain language excused the pipeline from providing balancing services whenever the upstream pipeline required the pipeline or the shipper to limit imbalances attributable to the shipper.
- The Court rendered judgment for the pipeline on the shipper's repudiation and fraud, fraudulent-inducement and negligent-misrepresentation claims, remanded the breach-of-contract claims for a new trial, and cautioned that lost profits from an untested forward-sales strategy dependent on volatile gas prices are speculative.
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23-0564·Petition For Review
- A mineral owner cannot show justifiable reliance, as a matter of law, on a lessee's oral representations that it would drill rather than "flip" the lease, where the signed paid-up lease gives the lessee an unqualified right to assign it and imposes no drilling obligation.
- Fraud by nondisclosure fails without a duty to disclose, and arm's-length counterparties owe none, particularly about the contents of public deed records; a claim that a promise about recording the lease was a scheme to induce a later sale fails for lack of evidence of intent.
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23-0671·Other
- A 1951 deed's "1/128 (1/16 of the usual 1/8 royalty)" language rebuts the double-fraction presumption because it uses 1/8 for its ordinary numerical value, so the deed conveyed a fixed 1/128 royalty interest, not a floating 1/16.
- The Court reversed the court of appeals and reinstated the trial court's summary judgment for the Cliftons.
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23-0676·Other
- A deed or lease using typical language to convey oil-and-gas rights, though silent on produced water, conveys the hydrocarbon lessee the right to possession, custody, control, and disposition of the constituent water in the liquid waste that is inevitably produced with the hydrocarbons; a surface owner who wants to keep it must reserve it expressly.
- The Court rejected the surface owner's lessee's argument that produced water is groundwater belonging to the surface estate and that the lessee's rights are merely usufructuary, distinguishing Robinson v. Robbins Petroleum and the groundwater cases as addressing water, not oil-and-gas waste.
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23-0772·Petition For Review
- The Court granted the petition, vacated the court of appeals' judgment and remanded to the trial court under the parties' settlement in a challenge to the Railroad Commission's permit for a multi-tract horizontal well drilled without the mineral owners' consent.
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23-0927·Petition For Review
- A passive-voice habendum clause continuing an oil-and-gas lease "as long thereafter as" minerals are produced from the land does not require the lessee to personally cause production, so a non-operating co-tenant's leases did not terminate where the operating co-tenant continuously produced in commercial paying quantities.
- The Court disapproved Mattison v. Trotti (5th Cir.), Hughes v. Cantwell and Cimarex Energy v. Anadarko to the extent they hold otherwise, construed an ambiguous paragraph in one lease against automatic termination under the rule disfavoring forfeiture, and noted the producing co-tenant's remedy is an accounting.
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24-0090·Petition For Review
- The Court denied Ageron Energy's petition for review of a dismissal of its trespass and nuisance suit over hydrogen sulfide injected by ETC that ruined its drilling attempt, and Justice Busby, joined by Justice Devine, concurred to explain that the court of appeals made two legal errors even though its result may be right.
- The concurrence said res judicata bars only claims that were ripe and could have been litigated in an earlier suit, and that a mineral lessee's claim accrues when the trespass infringes its ability to explore, obtain, produce and possess the minerals, not when gas reaches a location or a drilling attempt fails.
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24-0425·Petition For Review
- A fracking company did not breach its water-supply contract by buying water from other suppliers, because its oil wells sit outside the scope of the contract's exclusivity clause making Lindale the exclusive water provider and pumper "on the Pipeline."
- The Court reversed the court of appeals and rendered judgment for Equinor.
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24-0987·Petition For Review
- The Court granted both petitions, vacated the trial court's and court of appeals' judgments, and dismissed the case as moot after the parties settled, but denied the requests to vacate the court of appeals' opinion or remand to the court of appeals to consider vacatur.
- The petitions raised whether a gas-dedication agreement over a multi-million-acre Permian Basin area of mutual interest is subject to the statute of frauds and whether a court may enforce part of an otherwise invalid property description.
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24-1033·Petition For Review
- A "free of cost forever" royalty reserved on minerals "produced from the above described acreage" is calculated on raw gas at the wellhead, so it bears postproduction costs of preparing the minerals for sale downstream.
- The Court reversed the court of appeals, rendered judgment in part for the operators, and remanded.
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25-0012·Petition For Review
- In a dispute over a 1933 deed reserving "an undivided one-fourth of the usual one eighth royalty," the Court held the court of appeals had jurisdiction to consider the presumed-grant doctrine in a permissive appeal, and reversed in part, vacated in part, and remanded.
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25-0063·Petition For Review
- The Court granted the petition, vacated the trial court's orders and the court of appeals' judgment, and remanded for rendition of judgment under the parties' settlement without reaching the merits, but denied the parties' request to vacate the court of appeals' opinion.
- The petition argued that the appeal from a temporary injunction protecting pipelines was moot once construction ended and that the injunction was not vague or overbroad.
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25-0089·Petition For Review
- The Court granted two petitions for review in a dispute over a natural gas processing plant construction contract and, on the parties' joint motion under Rule 56.3 and without argument or considering the merits, vacated the trial court's and court of appeals' judgments and remanded for rendition of judgment under their settlement agreement.
- The petitions had asked whether the Texas Prompt Payment Act's exemption for mineral development and oilfield services covers a contract to engineer and build a gas plant, and whether the contractor's underlying contract claim failed.
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25-0637·Petition For Review
- Whether a shipper that prepaid $32.7 million for firm pipeline transportation and terminal loading under related "ship-or-pay" agreements can recover its prepayment when the carrier never provided a terminal capable of loading a million-barrel vessel or transported one of the contract grades of crude, or whether the agreements' vessel limits and nomination requirements defeat the claim.
- Whether related contracts must be construed together and in harmony, so that an exhibit's loading specifications cannot negate the terminal-service obligations in the Terminal Agreement, and whether the futility doctrine excuses the shipper from nominating a vessel or grade the carrier had not made available.
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25-0673·Petition For Review
- Which statute of limitations governs a constitutional takings claim for real property: whether, as the court of appeals held, the ten-year adverse possession period applies to every such claim, or whether the adverse possession statute that fits the taking, here the twenty-five-year statute, governs.
- Whether the twenty-five-year statute applies to the State's alleged mass taking of royalty interests in more than 1,600 acres along a stretch of the Canadian River, whether the discovery rule or class-action tolling saves the landowners' claims, and whether the court of appeals should have remanded rather than rendering a take-nothing judgment for the State.
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25-1085·Petition For Review
- The Court vacated and remanded an oil-and-gas deed dispute involving double fractions so the court of appeals can reconsider it in light of Clifton v. Johnson (Tex. Mar. 13, 2026), which it lacked when it ruled.
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