In Antrim and Kalkaska Counties, Somebody Else Often Owns the Gas Under the House

"Excepting and reserving unto the grantor all oil, gas and other minerals."

One sentence, usually sitting just under the legal description, usually on a deed from the seventies. It means the people selling you the house are not selling you what's underneath it, and in Antrim and Kalkaska Counties that happens often enough that I look for the line before I look at almost anything else on the title work.

Michigan treats the surface and the minerals as two separate pieces of property. You can sell one and keep the other, and once they've been split they usually stay split for generations. That's true everywhere in the state. It matters more up here because the Antrim Shale runs right through the counties we work in.

The play produced gas out of more than 9,000 wells across northern Michigan, centered on Otsego County and spreading into everything around it through the eighties and nineties. The commercial well trackers put Antrim County alone somewhere around 1,600 wells drilled since 1982. I haven't audited that number against EGLE's own records and you shouldn't take it from me, but the order of magnitude is right, and a lot of that ground is listed today as vacant residential or hunting acreage.

What a mineral owner is allowed to do on your land

More than most buyers expect. EGLE's mineral rights fact sheet says the owner or lessee of the mineral rights, severed or not, "has the right to reasonable use of the land to extract minerals from the property." The surface owner, meaning you, "may be entitled to compensation for loss of crops or timber."

Read that list of what you get paid for again. Crops. Timber. Not your view, not your driveway, not your quiet, not the resale value of a forty with a wellhead sitting on it.

And if you own a fraction of the minerals and don't want anything drilled? Michigan has a pooling process for exactly that. Whoever wants to drill petitions EGLE for an order pooling the non-consenting owners into the drilling unit, and the order sets a development plan and splits the costs and the proceeds. You get compensated. You don't get a veto.

There is a 300-foot setback in the Part 615 rules between a regulated well and occupied structures and existing water wells, and it is less protective than it sounds. EGLE's rules FAQ takes the question "Can the GRMD prevent encroachment?" and answers it with one word, and the word is no. Setbacks get evaluated once, at the time the Permit to Drill and Operate is issued, and encroachment after that doesn't affect the permittee's right to operate under Part 615. Put a cabin 200 feet from an existing wellhead and the state's position is that you're the one who moved.

The twenty-year clock

This part works in a buyer's favor. Act 42 of 1963, the Termination of Oil or Gas Interests in Land, sitting at MCL 554.291. Severed oil or gas rights revert to the surface owner after twenty years unless one of five things happened during the window:

A drilling permit was issued. Oil or gas was actually produced or withdrawn. The interest was used for underground gas storage. The interest was sold, leased, mortgaged or transferred by recorded instrument. Or a written notice was filed with the county Register of Deeds.

Two limits on that. Act 42 covers oil and gas and nothing else, so a reservation of sand, gravel, limestone or metallic minerals never expires on its own. And the act exempts interests owned by a governmental body, which means a state reservation doesn't run out either.

That last preservation method is the one keeping most severances alive up here. Filing a notice of interest with the Register of Deeds is cheap and easy, and the family trusts and lease-holding companies that own these interests have people who calendar it. Assume a severance you find on a 1968 deed is still good until somebody walks the chain. Twenty years sounds like a long time right up until you see how little the paperwork costs to reset it.

Your title policy won't answer this

Owner's policies carry a general mineral exception in Schedule B. The wording moves around a little by underwriter, but the effect is the same: any claim to ownership of or rights to minerals, whether it arises by lease, grant, exception, conveyance or reservation, gets excepted out of your coverage. Title companies don't insure minerals because insuring them would mean running the chain all the way back to the original federal patent, which is a different and far more expensive search than the one you're paying for.

Michigan's seller's disclosure statement doesn't ask about mineral rights either. That form is statutory, so a seller who says nothing about it isn't hiding anything from you, but it does mean nobody in the transaction has been handed the job of telling you. I've written before about how much weight that disclosure form actually carries, and this is one more thing it doesn't carry. Same goes for the standard exceptions buried in your title commitment, which are worth reading line by line on any purchase up here.

How to check

Two different questions, two different tools.

For wells, EGLE runs GeoWebFace at Michigan.gov/EGLE/Maps-Data/GeoWebFace. Pick the Town from the dropdown, then the Range, then the Section, then hit Quick Zoom, and the hydrocarbon wells plot on your parcel and everything around it. Dataminer, at michigan.gov/egle/maps-data/dataminer, gets you into the well files, logs and production records behind those dots. Both are free and neither one makes you create an account.

For ownership, you need the deed abstract. EGLE says so plainly: ownership of the mineral rights in a parcel "can usually be determined by examining the deed abstract for the property." Your title company can run a mineral search for you. It's a separate product with a separate fee, it is not in the standard package, and in my experience nobody offers it unless you ask. So ask, in writing, inside your inspection period.

October 27

The DNR is proposing an online oil and gas lease auction for October 27, 2026. The public notice is a PDF called PNPropAuctOct26.pdf, linked off the DNR's oil and gas page. There's also a direct lease request pending from ReefWorks LLC covering parcels in Kalkaska County, with a virtual public meeting set for October 22.

Those are state-owned rights being leased, not yours. I bring them up because buyers sometimes arrive up here assuming the gas business wrapped up around 2010 and every well left is an orphan. It didn't, and they aren't.

Who should care and who shouldn't

If you're buying a house on a quarter acre inside the city, skip all of this. The minerals under a platted lot in town are almost certainly severed, almost certainly worth nothing at that size, and nobody is drilling your block.

If you're buying acreage east of US-31, in Antrim or Kalkaska or the eastern half of Grand Traverse County, and especially if you're buying it to build on or to hunt, pull the well map before you write the offer. It takes ten minutes. I would not close on forty acres in Kalkaska County without knowing whether there's a producing well on it or next door to it, and I'd want that answer before the inspection contingency runs, not after.

What I don't know is what any of this does to value. I haven't seen a clean paired-sales study on severed minerals in Northern Michigan, and I'd be skeptical of anybody who hands you a percentage. Janel has been reading these deeds for twenty-five years and her answer is that it depends entirely on whether anything is happening on the ground, because an old reservation on a quiet forty is just paperwork and an active wellhead 300 feet from where you wanted the house is a different conversation entirely.

If you're looking at land up here and want a second set of eyes on the title work, send it over. I'm happy to read the boring part with you. You can see what we have listed right now on our current listings page.

Taylor Brown, Realtor
Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com
(231) 360-1510