Not always. In Alabama, the minerals under a tract can belong to someone other than the owner of the surface. An earlier owner may have kept them in a deed, sold them in a separate mineral deed, or leased them out. You find out by reading the chain of title at the county probate office, reading the title company's exceptions, and making the purchase contract say what conveys.
The Surface and the Minerals Can Be Two Separate Properties
Many first-time buyers picture a deed covering everything from the treetops down. Plenty of deeds do. But land can be split into layers, and each layer can have its own owner.
The surface estate is the ground you walk, build on, and hunt. The mineral estate is what lies under it, such as coal, oil, and gas. When the two belong to different people, the minerals are severed. That usually happens in one of three ordinary ways.
- A reservation. An owner sells the land but writes into the deed that they keep the minerals. Look for "reserving" or "less and except," followed by words like "oil, gas, and minerals" or "coal."
- A mineral deed. An owner sells the minerals by themselves, in a separate recorded deed, and keeps the surface.
- A mineral lease. An owner keeps the minerals but gives a company the right to explore for them and produce them, usually for a term of years.
A severance can be decades old and still show up in the title work today. Whether one affects a given tract is a question for the records, so don't guess.
Why Severed Minerals Turn Up in Shelby and Jefferson
Parts of Alabama have a long history of mining and drilling. The Geological Survey of Alabama says on its coal resources page that "coal has been mined commercially in 21 northern Alabama counties for more than 150 years." The same page estimates "over 4,000 underground coal mines in Alabama since the late 19th century."
Shelby County sits on part of that geology. A 1911 USGS report on the southern part of the Cahaba coal field put its study area "in the northeast corner of Bibb County and the western part of Shelby County." The Survey's coal pages list Shelby and Jefferson among the counties that produce coalbed methane. That's natural gas drawn from coal seams.
Where companies wanted coal and gas, they needed the rights to it. So mineral rights in these counties had buyers, and owners had reasons to lease or keep them. That's our reading of the history, not a count from the records. Plan on finding a reservation or a lease somewhere in the chain, and know what it says before you sign.
The County Can Tax the Minerals Separately
Alabama law treats a severed mineral interest as its own piece of property for taxes. Section 40-7-15 says mineral, coal, oil, gas, timber, and turpentine interests, "when they have been severed in ownership from the soil, by sale or otherwise, shall be separately appraised and assessed." Timber can be split off the same way. That's one more reason to read what the timber on a tract is worth before you buy.
Section 40-7-16 gives buyers a clue. If only the surface right is assessed, the land description "may be preceded or followed by the letters S.R." If only the mineral interest is assessed, it may carry "M.R."
So an S.R. next to a tract on a county tax record is a reason to ask who holds the minerals. The statute says "may," though. No mark on the record means only that you still have to check the probate file.
LandScout tracks 16,727 undeveloped parcels in Shelby County, per the Shelby County numbers. Each parcel on the county tax roll lists an owner of record. That roll tells you whom to ask. The probate records tell you what they hold.
How Do You Find a Reservation in the Chain of Title?
The answer sits in the probate records of the county where the land is. Our note on how to look up the deed on an Alabama tract walks through the search itself. For minerals, add three habits.
Don't stop at the seller's deed. A reservation can sit several deeds back. The current seller's deed may say nothing about minerals while the deed before it kept them all. Read each deed in the chain as far back as you can. Look for "reserving," "excepting," "less and except," "minerals," "oil and gas," and "coal."
Search the past owners' names. A mineral deed or lease is indexed under the names of the people who signed it, and that may be an owner from forty years ago. Shelby's recording room records search lets you filter by document type. Run each earlier owner's name with the deed and lease types selected.
Read how much was kept. A reservation may cover all the minerals, a fraction such as one-half, or a single mineral such as coal. Copy the exact wording and the legal description it covers. Then check that the description actually lands on your tract.
This is research done the hard way, and it gives you specific questions to put to the title company.
What the Oil and Gas Board's Well Records Can and Can't Tell You
The State Oil and Gas Board of Alabama keeps a public well database. You can search it by county, operator, well name, and other fields, and a well record shows the operator, the well type, its status, and its location.
Use it for context. Search the county and the field or operator names near your tract. If wells come up nearby, the area has drilling history. Nearby wells suggest the title search may turn up mineral leases or reservations, so plan to read them.
The well database has limits. Wells tell you where drilling happened. Ownership is a separate record, kept with the deeds. Coal mining is a separate history again, and the Survey's coal page notes that until recently "no unified source existed" to locate the state's underground mines.
Ask, Read, and Make the Contract Say What Conveys
The rest of this section is our advice, not law. Run the specifics past a real estate attorney before you sign.
- Ask the seller, in writing. Do they own the minerals? Are any leased? Do they know of a reservation? A seller may honestly not know, so treat the answer as a lead.
- Make the contract say it. The purchase contract can state whether the seller's mineral interest, whatever it turns out to be, conveys with the land. If the minerals matter to you, the attorney can tie the sale to what the title search finds.
- Read the title commitment's exceptions. Before closing, the title company issues a commitment that lists exceptions, the items its policy won't cover. A mineral reservation found in the search should appear there. Ask the title company to point out every exception that mentions minerals.
- Ask the practical question. If someone else holds the minerals, what can they do on the surface? The answer depends on the wording of the documents, and it's the question an attorney is there to answer.
For a homesite or a hunting tract, the minerals may never come up again after closing. The time to decide whether they matter is before you sign, with the documents in hand.
A LandScout plan gathers the owner of record, the parcel number, and the screening data for a tract on one screen, and the pricing page shows what each plan includes.
Read the old deeds before you trust the new one. A mineral reservation can hide in any of them.