How can you stake a claim to land underneath the surface? I mean, who owns what down there? Eventually, someone is going to find a way to live down there. And eventually someone is going find a way to utlizie that land. So I guess my question is, how deep do you have to go before the land is free for the taking? And how do you take it?
My grandmother owns some land that goes about six feet deep right next to my grandfather, so you can't have that...
No idea about way out there, but obviously land is divided up. Land in the gulf, for example, is partitioned into a number of blocks, and most of the big oil and gas companies or your offshore independents (a Devon Energy, for example) either purchase rights to drill on the land or purchase the land itself (my guess is the former and someone - U.S. Gov't perhaps still does actually "own" the area - don't know for sure). People may eventually live down there, but comfortable living by the masses is a long long long way away, imo.
If you own the surface, you own all that is underneath said surface - mineral/drilling rights etc.... I don't think there's a cutoff depth where it becomes some sort of quasi-public resource. p.s. I'm kinda talking out of my ass here, so there's a good chance I'm wrong.
If you find oil on your land, the oil belongs to you. Therefore it would seem that the current way of doing things is that you buy surface area on the Earth, but get everything under it too. Edit: Looks like Buck and I are thinking along the same lines.
i could be wrong, but owning the land does not mean you own the mineral rights to the land. they're two different things. once you own the mineral rights, it's all yours.
Just checked with my dad, who's got 1st hand experience with this - the owner of a piece of land owns the stuff underneath that land. You can lease the exploration/mining/drilling rights & collect royalties (just as you can with logging trees above ground) or can negotiate a flat fee for the rights to extract stuff from the ground for a set period of time. These leases are transferable, meaning that if you bought a place that was leased, the lease stays in effect for its duration & the new owner would begin to collect the royalties, unless it is stipulated as a condition of the sale that the royalty payments continue to go to the previous owner. Believe it or not, a landowner also owns a fixed distance above ground as well, i.e. he owns the "air". Not sure how high up it goes, probably a thousand feet or so.
SWTsig is right owning land does not give you the rights to oil/gas/gold/coal anything that is under the surface..those are covered in the mineral lease...you must own both the surface rights and the mineral rights.. if you dont have the mineral rights, your SOL
This is correct. Many, many people own land but not the mineral rights. If you go to West Texas you can find tons of cheap land for ranching, but if you try to buy the mineral rights for it, you have to pay WAY more for the mineral rights, plus the mineral rights usually belong to somebody totally different. Owning the land on top DOES NOT give you the mineral rights. This is a totally seperate title. Plus, if you own the land, and the people with the mineral rights want to extract their minerals or oil or gas or whatever, they can come get it anytime they want. The only thing the can't do is damage your homestead or move you off the property. They can put an oil pump in your front yard though. Buck and arkoe are mistaken.
Yeah, supermac & swtsig, that's what I was trying to say but I kinda left out the whole separate title issue.
That's right. Mr. Burns used this to his advantage with his Slant Drilling Company when they discovered oil under Springfield Elementary.
This is interesting. If I could correctly predict the route of a future underground metro, I could buy the mineral rights to such land, and then cash out when the metro builders had to buy it from me to dig. In addition to that, in theory, if you own the land underneath your house, you actually own a lot more real estate than you originally thought. Thus in 1000 years when underground housing and metro become the norm the people who own property near big cities will become extremely wealthy. They can simply sell their realestate below ground to the highest bidder and they still get to keep their house.
On a related topic, how would one go about claiming unowned territory, like the moon or Mars? If I built a habitat on the moon, could I claim the moon and then sell it to governments once they start wanting to build moon bases?
someone has already beat you too it, at least for the moon.. was a guy on Jay Leno a few months ago, he sells land on the moon! There is some procedure for claiming land..through the UN..and this guy went through the process back in the 60's, and I guess he was the first/only one to do it right .. anyways, he says Marriott, Hilton, all have bought a lot of property on the moon..
I was just talking about this with friends yesterday. We were wakeboarding on Lake Travis and an island called appropriately "Sometimes Island" has surfaced as it usually does when the summer dry spell hits. I wanted to plant a flag on it or something, but was voted down. Here is something you can do with a structure built in international waters... Welcome to Sealand. Now Bugger Off. Hunkered down on a North Sea fortress, a crew of armed cypherpunks, amped-up networking geeks, and libertarian swashbucklers is seceding from the world to pursue a revolutionary idea: an offshore, fat-pipe data haven that answers to nobody. By Simson Garfinkel Ryan Lackey, a 21-year-old MIT dropout and self-taught crypto expert, sees fantastic things for himself in 2005. For starters, he'll be filthy rich. But his future is animated by more than just money - to wit, the exploration of a huge idea he thinks will change the world. Lackey's big concept? That freedom is the next killer app. Before you get too choked up, you should know that Lackey means giving corporations and frisky individuals the "freedom" to store and move data without answering to anybody, including competitors, regulators, and lawyers. He's part of a crew of adventurers and cypherpunks that's working to transform a 60-year-old gunnery fort in the North Sea - an odd, quasi-independent outpost whose British owner calls it "the Principality of Sealand" - into something that could be possible only in the 21st century: a fat-pipe Internet server farm and global networking hub that combines the spicier elements of a Caribbean tax shelter, Cryptonomicon, and 007. This summer, with $1 million in seed money provided by a small core of Internet-fattened investors, Lackey and his colleagues are setting up Sealand as the world's first truly offshore, almost-anything-goes electronic data haven - a place that occupies a tantalizing gray zone between what's legal and what's ... possible. Especially if you exist, as the Sealanders plan to, outside the jurisdiction of the world's nation-states. Simply put: Sealand won't just be offshore. It will be off-government. The startup is called, fittingly, HavenCo Ltd. Headquartered on a 6,000-square-foot, World War II-era antiaircraft deck that comprises the "land" of Sealand, the facility isn't much to look at and probably never will be. It consists of a rusty steel deck sitting on two hollow, chubby concrete cylinders that rise 60 feet above the churn of the North Sea. Up top there's a drab building and a jury-rigged helicopter landing pad... Sealand was originally called Roughs Tower; it was built as part of a complex of no-frills antiaircraft forts designed for shooting down Nazi planes on bombing runs to England. The old battle station stands in 24 feet of North Sea brine, 6 miles east of Felixstowe, an industrial port on the southeast coast of England. Abandoned after the war, the structure was occupied in '67 by Roy Bates, a British war veteran who renamed it Sealand, declared its independence from Great Britain, and appointed himself its "prince." He got away with it, too - sort of. Officially, the UK doesn't recognize Sealand, but except for a few dustups now and then, the government has left the strange little fief alone. The bigger challenge for Bates has been figuring out what to do with it. Over the years, Roy (the royal patriarch, now 78), his wife, Joan (also known as Princess Joan, 70), and his son, Michael (the dauphin-style heir apparent, 47), have earned their livings through fairly ordinary pursuits - like commercial fishing and fish processing - while shuttling back and forth between the platform and the mainland and styling themselves dual citizens of Sealand and the UK. They've theorized about various moneymaking plans - pirate radio outposts, tax havens, pleasure dens, casinos - but in the end, Sealand has been a money pit. The Bateses say they've spent huge amounts on upkeep, supplies, legal fees, and improvements. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven_pr.html
Woah. I'm actually in the middle of reading Cryptonomicon (by Neal Stephenson) right now. What coincidence. I never knew someone was actually pursuing the dream of a data haven (which is half of the plot of the book... sort of). Veeeeeeery interesting.
The Chinese are shooting for mining rights on the Moon's so who knows... Countries have made various land and mining claims in Antarctica, but they are not internationally recognized. Texas has some seriously screwed up water laws. Right of free capture, basically you can own a square inch of land and pump an entire aquifer dry. Its also called the law of the biggest pump.
NO WAY!!! So am I...thats how I remembered the Sealand story... "If you want me to believe you are not the Dentist, provide plausible explanation for your question regarding why we are building the Crypt"... You're not Andrew Loeb are you?
