Updated October 2026.
"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.
A geologist named A.C. Lane named the formation in 1901 off outcrops in Antrim County. 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.
Sometimes the other owner is the State of Michigan
The DNR manages over 6.4 million acres of mineral rights, including almost 2.3 million acres where someone other than the state owns the surface. Most of those were picked up between 1920 and 1940, when land went back to the state for unpaid taxes, and when the state later sold the land it usually kept the minerals.
Cutover timber land and failed farms that nobody paid taxes on for a decade describe a real share of the ground between here and Kalkaska. A lot of it went back out the door with the surface and the minerals pointed at two different owners, and that matters for the twenty-year clock below.
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. Royalties follow the minerals too, so if gas comes out from under your forty, the check goes to whoever owns the mineral estate. Anything you get for the use of your ground is a negotiation, not a right.
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 to pool 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, sits at MCL 554.291. A severed oil or gas interest is deemed abandoned and goes to the surface owner after twenty years unless one of these 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 the owner recorded a claim of interest with the county Register of Deeds.
Two limits on that. Act 42 covers oil and gas and nothing else. Sand, gravel, limestone, salt and metallic minerals don't come to you under it, and the DNR says a dormant severed interest in those reverts to the last owner of those rights in the chain of title, not to the surface owner. Around here, where a good gravel deposit is worth real money, that distinction matters.
The second limit is bigger. The act exempts interests owned by a governmental body, and the DNR says neither the dormant minerals law nor the Marketable Record Title Act applies to governmental entities. If the State of Michigan holds the minerals under your parcel, the clock never runs out.
For private severances, the recorded claim is the one keeping most of them alive up here. Filing it 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, and the disclosure form barely asks
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 asks about all of this exactly once. Item 12 on the statutory form reads "Mineral rights: Do you own the mineral rights?" with three boxes: unknown, yes, no. Under MCL 565.956, a seller who doesn't know complies with the law by saying the information is unknown, and most sellers don't know, because a severance doesn't show up on the tax bill, the insurance policy or the survey. Expect "unknown" and read it as exactly that. I've written before about how much weight that disclosure form actually carries.
On vacant land you don't even get the checkbox. The disclosure requirements only apply to property with one to four residential dwelling units, so on the raw acreage where severed minerals matter most, nobody hands you the homework. 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.
Then get three answers before you write the offer. Does the title commitment except the minerals? Make the title company answer in a sentence, not a paragraph number. If they're severed, who holds them: a person, a company or the state? A private holder can sometimes be found and bought out, and if it's the state, call the DNR's minerals office, because the twenty-year clock won't help you. Is there a recorded lease, and when was the last recorded activity? Twenty-plus years of silence is the setup for an Act 42 claim, and that's a conversation for a real estate attorney.
The gas business isn't over
The DNR has proposed an online oil and gas lease auction for October 27, 2026, and there's a direct lease request pending from ReefWorks LLC covering parcels in Kalkaska County, with a virtual public meeting set for October 22, 2026.
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.
The next version of this question is the empty rock itself. Senate Bills 394, 395 and 396 would set rules for who owns the pore space underground and have EGLE permit projects that inject carbon dioxide into deep rock formations. The Senate passed the package on September 4, 2025, and it was sent to the House Committee on Energy, where it still sat as of October 2026. As the Senate Fiscal Agency describes it, a project would have to notify all surface owners above the proposed storage reservoir, pore-space interests could be pooled into unit areas, the per-ton fee would be capped at 22 cents adjusted for inflation, and a Community Benefits Fund could only be spent on grants to those surface owners. None of that is law yet. If it passes, the space a half-mile under your property gets a value and a paperwork trail of its own.
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 21-plus 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.
Nobody should walk away from a good forty because the minerals were severed in 1937. Plenty of land up here has been bought, loved and handed down with this exact footnote in the title work. Know it before you sign, not in year three.
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.
Checked against the sources linked above in October 2026.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com
(231) 360-1510
