Who owns underground

A mineral owner's rights typically include the right to use the surface of the land to access and mine the minerals owned. This might mean the mineral owner has the right to drill an oil or natural gas well, or excavate a mine on your property. The mineral owner is also commonly allowed to build roadways or other improvements necessary to facilitate the mineral extraction. Sometimes the terms of the conveyance of the mineral rights restrict the mineral owner's rights. For example, a mineral deed might put a time limit on how long drilling can continue, or restrict excavation to a certain depth.

Additionally, to protect the land owner and the environment, state and local laws regulating mining and drilling typically contain restrictions on mineral extraction activities. If a mineral owner contacts you about removing minerals under your land, your first step should be to contact a lawyer in your area experienced in mineral law.

The attorney can help you wade through this complex area of law and determine who really owns the minerals under your land an arduous process of tracing deeds back to the original mineral reservation or conveyance.

A number of owners might even own the rights to different minerals. Additionally, sometimes mineral royalties the right to profit from the minerals are conveyed separately from the mineral ownership rights.

If someone has a valid ownership right, you might not be able to prevent them from removing the minerals. You can, however, talk with the attorney about how to minimize the removal operations' impact on you and your land. At a minimum, the attorney can take steps to ensure that the mineral owner complies with any and all restrictions and regulations governing the mineral extraction and clean-up process.

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Meet the Editors. Its first use in court is attributed to the case of Bury V Pope in , during which the maxim was cited as justification for a large structure being erected that blocked out the natural light to another property owner's home.

Since back in those days there was no such thing as the " right to light " essentially the right to not have the flow of natural light to your home impeded , it was decided that the building of the structure was entirely legal, since the owner of the land owned all of the air above his land too. Today, the maxim is still used as a guideline. However, as a property owner you only really have the right to the airspace above your land located in the lower stratum, the precise boundaries of which are not explicitly labelled.

In the end, you are supposed to be entitled to enough airspace to reasonably enjoy the land below that air. However, exactly what this means is up for debate. For example, you can't ask commercial planes to stop flying over your house, because the sky is considered to be a public highway. You could potentially, however, prosecute an overzealous news helicopter for hovering over your house if it was impeding your enjoyment of the land.

Again, this would vary on a case-by-case basis but there have been instances of people being fined for trespassing for flying over someone's land; so it's not unheard of in US or British law. The most famous case of this kind comes from when a chicken farmer named Thomas Lee Causby sued the US government for flying approximately 83 feet above his property, the noise of which caused a bunch of Causby's chicken's to accidentally kill themselves by running into walls.

Causby won his case and the courts agreed that although a property owner wasn't entitled to own all of the air above their land, they were entitled to enough so that planes flying overhead wouldn't kill their chickens.

Today in the UK thanks to the Civil Aviation Act of , the generally accepted amount of air above one's roof a person is entitled to is approximately , feet, though again this isn't a hard definition. Likewise, the United States has a similar estimation of about feet, though this has never been officially ruled on by the Supreme Court. In both cases, this may be soon changing with the widespread introduction of drones, both personal, commercial, and those owned by the respective governments.

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Discover LexisPSL. News 4. Fishing in troubled waters Pearson v Foster Law Society updates its practice note on flood risk What facts define the cause of action in trespass? But it is generally contained in the pore spaces and cracks of the subsurface, crystalline rock. There may be vast quantities in the ground at a given place, but the yields from wells are generally smaller and more variable.

In reality, it was and is difficult or impossible to prove the existence of an underground stream. In other words, like the riparian rights that come with ownership of land alongside surface water, the right to extract and use groundwater is one of the bundle of rights that come with real estate ownership.

This just raises more questions, chief among them being: if I pump a well on my land so that the water in your well on adjacent property drops, perhaps below the level where you can still pump it without drilling deeper, can you sue me to stop that infringement?

Or similarly, if my pumping causes bad contaminated or saline water to enter your well, can you get a court or an agency to stop me from pumping? Leaving aside the huge proof problems this scenario raises, especially in the piedmont and west where groundwater moves through preferential pathways in rock that are not always easy to figure out, the answer in NC is as follows:.

However, if your intended use is to distribute that water elsewhere, you might not even win damages for my pumping. In other words, NC law has treated groundwater rights much like riparian rights for surface water.

The seminal cases are Rouse v. Kinston, N. Nello Teer, N. This basic NC water law obviously causes concern for public water systems that rely on groundwater for source water to serve many customers and businesses.

So far, though, except in an area of the central coastal plain about which more shortly , the usually plentiful water resources in the state have kept the conflicts to a minimum. However, in another context—drought—this basic water law has presented major challenges to public water systems. In short, during the extreme droughts of the early s, many public systems in the state wanted to restrict the use of groundwater in their jurisdictions, to match the restrictions they were imposing on centrally supplied water.

Cities and counties and some other special purpose local units of government can require connections to their central systems, or in lieu of connections can charge landowners in close proximity to the central system lines a fee for the availability of public water; they can also must also prohibit cross-connections between public systems and private wells.