The economic viability of extracting oil and natural gas from unconventional shale formations has resulted in a significant direct financial benefit to thousands of landowners in Pennsylvania. It has focused attention on the importance — and in some cases the difficulty — of identifying the parties who possess the ability to lease the rights to develop these resources when ownership of the oil or gas interests is not easily determined. In many cases, the unknown status of the subsurface interest owners results from the passage of many decades after the severance of all or part of the oil and gas estate by a previous owner in the chain of title. Increasingly, Pennsylvania lawyers have turned to the action to quiet title as a means to clear legal impediments from the road to development.
The natural gas industry requires certainty in order to make the considerable financial investment to prospect and produce oil and gas from unconventional shale gas plays. Competing claimants to these valuable rights have a strong interest in securing title. The misuse and, in some cases, abuse of the action to quiet title has resulted in the opening and striking of judgments (almost always obtained by default) reuniting oil and gas estates with that of surface owners, in some instances only after oil and gas leases to develop those resources have been entered into. An additional concern in split estate situations is the marketability of the surface owner's title to his or her land, coupled with the fear of adverse impact to his or her property from the development of the separately owned oil and gas reserves.
