Today, the Supreme Court of Ohio issued its first decision involving the Ohio Dormant Mineral Act ("DMA"). In Dodd v. Croskey, 2015-Ohio-2362, the Court unanimously concluded that under the 2006 version of the DMA, a severed mineral interest holder can preserve his or her interest in the minerals by either: (a) filing an affidavit of record that identifies a savings event in the 20 years preceding the notice of abandonment, or (b) timely filing a claim to preserve within the 60 days immediately following the notice of abandonment.
The importance of this decision is that even if no savings events occurred within the twenty years preceding the abandonment notice, a mineral interest can still be preserved if the holder of the mineral interest timely files a claim to preserve within the 60 days following the notice of abandonment.
Note that the decision does not address whether a repeating mineral reservation is a “title transaction” savings event for the mineral interest. The decision also does not address whether the 1989 DMA is self-executing. That issue is the subject of next week’s oral argument in Walker v. Shondrick-Nau.
Read the decision here.
Update: Read our Client Alert here.