
Playing by the Rule (2010) - dredmorbius
https://www.texasobserver.org/playing-by-the-rule/
======
dredmorbius
This is an obscure law still underlying (so to speak) much of resource
extracton, in the US and elsewhere, even if moderated somewhat. It played an
outsized role especially in the history of oil and gas development (see
especially chapter 13 of Daniel Yergin's _The Prize_ , as well as many
contemporary accounts of the Pennsylvania, Spindletop, Kern River/Longview,
and East Texas oil strikes), and has echoes in present attitudes expressed in
surveillance capitasim as practiced by Google, Facebook, Amazon, telcos,
financial firms, and other data brokers.

And yet information on it is exceedingly hard to come by.

Quoting TFA on the law's history:

 _Much of this fussing and fighting comes courtesy of the Rule of Capture, an
archaic piece of British common law carried to these shores. The Rule states
that whoever owns a piece of property owns the water beneath it. The Texas
precedent was set in 1843 in the case of Acton v. Blundell, when Texas was a
republic and people were largely ignorant about the nature and movement of
groundwater. The Rule of Capture was upheld in 1861, when Frazier v. Brown was
decided, and again in 1904 when the Texas Supreme Court heard The Houston &
Texas Central Railway Co. v. East case. The court upheld The Rule by reasoning
water below the soil was too “mysterious, secret, and occult” to regulate._

Copies of these rulings are hard to come by. Should anyone have access to
PDFs, please contact me at dredmorbius <at> protonmail <dot> com.

~~~
sgt101
Interestingly in the UK the "mysterious, secret, and occult" has been resolved
by the state with the maxim : "so it belongs to the Queen" (as the head of
state, not personally!)

~~~
dredmorbius
Similarly KSA, which unitised extraction at national scale.

A pretext for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was claims of slant-drilling against
Kuwait.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Kuwait](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Kuwait)

Pardon the rense link, but little else seems online:

[https://rense.com//general3/slant.htm](https://rense.com//general3/slant.htm)

NY Times:

[https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/03/world/confrontation-in-
th...](https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/03/world/confrontation-in-the-gulf-the-
oilfield-lying-below-the-iraq-kuwait-dispute.html)

