Normally, this blog discusses Texas court cases and decisions. However, occasionally, a court decision from one of our sister states is of interest. Such is the case with Briggs v. Southwestern Energy Production Co., 184 A.3d 153 (2018). In Briggs, the Pennsylvania Superior Court — equivalent to our Texas Courts of Appeal — held that a claim for subsurface trespass may be maintained as a result of hydraulic fracturing and that the “rule of capture” does not preclude the cause of action. This is, of course, directly at odds with the rule here in Texas established by Coastal Oil & Gas Corp. v. Garza Energy Trust, 268 S.W.3d 1 (Tex.2008). As a reminder, the Coastal Oil decision was a 6-3 split decision by the Texas Supreme Court. As one might expect, the Briggs opinion discussed Coastal Oil at length but concluded that the dissenters in Coastal Oil had the better arguments.
Briggs is another example that oil and gas law is changing — slowly — to reflect the fact that extracting petrochemicals from shale formations is different from extracting petrochemicals from older, more traditional oil fields. In this respect, Texas law is changing, too, as is evidenced by the recent Supreme Court case in Adams v. Murphy Exploration & Production Co.- USA, Case No. 16-0505 (Tex. 2018). In Adams/Murphy Exploration — involving offset wells — the Court highlighted the differences between vertical drilling into an underground reservoir and horizontal drilling into and using hydraulic pressure to extract oil/gas from a shale formation. With a reservoir, oil and gas will migrate across property lines towards any low pressure area created by a production well. However, there is no such migration in shale formations. Partly because of this difference, the Adams/Murphy Exploration court ruled that an offset well satisfied the requirements of the pertinent lease.
Briggs: Facts of Case and Court’s Reasoning
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