Not all transactions affecting mineral properties in present or
potential oil and gas producing areas involve the sale of securities.
Often, even those transactions which are regarded as sales of
securities come under one or more of the available exemptions,
expressed or implied, in the various Securities Laws of the United
States. The purpose of this article will be to categorize, as clearly
as possible, those oil and gas transactions which are: (1) not
regarded as securities transactions, (2) probably not securities
transactions but within the "areas of danger", (3) clearly securities
transactions. Once the attempt to categorize has been completed,
the available exemptions will be examined.
In closing, the penalty for intentional or, more often, innocent
mistake will be reviewed briefly. For those who are expert, or
even initiated, in the securities area, the penalties for failure to
comply with the securities acts are ever present in your mind, but
for the oil man who is unfamiliar or poorly advised in this area,
the revelations of this paper should be sufficient stimuli to encourage
him to secure competent advice.
The scope of this paper will be limited primarily to the Texas
and Federal Securites Acts. Under present-day securities regulations,
it would be futile and dangerous to examine the State Act
without also considering the Federal Act and vice versa, Important
decisions from other jurisdictions will also be considered for
their illumination in certain areas.
It will be helpful to those readers who are not familiar with
the niceties of oil and gas laws to begin with a brief explanation
of the various type of interests and legal relationships created in
and with respect to oil and gas properties. The legal relationships
created in the search for and in the development of the nation's
oil and gas resources are, in many respects, sui generis.1 The
nature of the interests created has been and will continue to be
as varied as the needs and bargaining powers of the various
parties to the agreements concerned with oil and gas developments.
The law relating to these interests combines familiar principles
of the law of property, contracts, landlord-tenant, and tenancyin-common;
however, in no other field are they combined in the
particular pattern and with the particular overtones that are found
in oil and gas law.2
In conjuction with the substantive law of the various states, in
the property and contract area, the Federal income taxation of oil
and gas has combined to create various standard transactions with
various labels attached to those interests so created. It is in the
financing of the drilling and development of potential oil and gas
properties that income tax considerations exert a large influence
on the form that the transaction will take. The special tax statutes
relating to the deduction for intangibles 3 and the allowance for
depletion 4 determine, as to a particular person, his desire to participate
in an exploration adventure almost as much as the high
potential the prospect has for a significant discovery. It is also in
the financing of drilling and development that the securities laws
are ever-present.
In order that the examination of the applicable securities laws
be tied to the various oil and gas transactions, it is helpful to
summarize these transactions as they normally occur in the in-