Mineral Rights?!? - Small Cabin Forum


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bugs Member	# Posted: 23 Aug 2009 09:27 Reply I happened to see a bit of a show regarding a couple who bought their piece of paradise and put up a cabin only to have a prospector stake a claim on their property. Essentially if you don't own your mineral rights any prospector or resource company can purchase them and come in and clear areas for drilling test holes etc. I have seen other shows where these test holes are left open for years for "future consideration" and never filled in or properly secured. And if they find something worth while the land owner really does not have a choice beyond receiving some financial compensation. I found the whole thing a bit disturbing that we really don't "own" our own land and I suspect many others on the forum don't either.
ncjeeper Member	# Posted: 16 Oct 2009 17:56 Reply Yep. Its an eye opener. The piece of property I just bought the gas and oil rights were sold back in the early 1900's. I have one not very active gas well on it now. The plus side is that the gas company comes in once a year and grades the access road to it. That way I have a free road into my property.
toyota_mdt_tech Member	# Posted: 4 Oct 2010 20:54 Reply I own both mineral and timber rights to my land. That was something I thought about when buying.
Xplorer Member	# Posted: 5 Oct 2010 10:51 Reply That was a deal breaker on a number of he properties we looked at. I'm glad my wife was on top of it when we were looking. The property we bought had all rights & turned out there is gas under us. The 5 year rights that the gas company purchased were for the same amount as what we paid for the land. My wife assured me that they would only frac under us & would bother to put a well base on our small amount of property (14ac).
Hermid Member	# Posted: 13 Oct 2010 15:45 Reply make sure you land comes with mineral rights. They tend to do that more in Northern Ontario then southern Ontario here(because of the unemployment issues in northern Ontario). The company has to pay you 4x the market value for the property
Driftless Area Member	# Posted: 11 Nov 2010 21:39 Reply And, yet, folks wonder why they need an attorney to do a "simple" real-estate closing. Penny wise, rights fewer. - David
hattie Member	# Posted: 11 Nov 2010 23:18 Reply Quoting: bugs I found the whole thing a bit disturbing that we really don't "own" our own land and I suspect many others on the forum don't either. Mining claims have been around since before there was a Canada. Surface rights and mineral rights are separate. A land owner has the surface rights, whereas a miner has the mineral rights. Very seldom are the mineral rights attached to the legal title of the land. The rules are different depending on where you live. We are in BC. Hubby and I both have our "Free Miner's Certificates"....Be assured bugs that you DO own your land. A placer miner has mineral rights and does NOT own any part of your land. In BC the rules for placer mining are changing rapidly. People with their "FMC" are allowed access and to cross private and Crown land for the purpose of exploring for minerals and sampling using manual techniques (ie pick, shovel, hand panning, sluice box, etc.). They are not allowed to excavate cultivated land, orchards or within the curtilage (drip line) of a building. Under the recent rules in BC, if on private land they must give the land owner 14 days' written notice detailing where and when and how many people will be involved and what will be done. Although notice is require, permission must be given. If their exploration is successful and it is their intent to excavate using large equipment, they will have to apply for a mining permit and this will involve negotiations with the land owner. In general terms, the land owner cannot prevent such a mine from being developed but the land must be returned to its original state by the miner. If a significant mine is being developed, land owners are usually well compensated for their inconvenience. If you are really worried about someone staking your property, you can get your own Free Miners' Certificate ($25 in BC) and stake your own property. You will be expected to actually work your claim, however. Claim cells in BC are about 21 hectares and it currently costs $2.00 per hectare to register the claim (online) and you must do $10 per hectare of work (ie. $210/year) to maintain your claim. That $210 of work means you (as foreman) at $30 per hour and your labourer (friend) at $20 per hour will have to put in just over 4 hours of work each year per claim. No money actually changes hands, this is just a way to calculate how much work you do on a claim. It costs $42 to re-register your claim for the following year and you have to submit a report of what you did and what you found. If you don't do any work on the claim and you want to keep it, you have to pay both amounts ($42 + $210 = $252) every year. If your property is so large that you need more than one claim to cover it, these rates apply for each claim cell. BC has found that the current rules are leading to people tying up land for non-mining purposes. In order to minimize this, the rules are expected to change next year to triple the initial registration fee ($126 per claim), double the amount of work required ($420 per year) and force those paying instead of working their claims to pay double that amount ($840 per year)! These rules are for placer claims. Mineral claims will have different rules. There are 3 different types of claims: mineral, placer and coal. Mineral is underground (hardrock mining), placer is river gravel and coal is coal. S All 3 types of claim can co-exist on the same piece of ground. If you are in BC and you want to see if there are any claims on your property, you can go to: https://www.mtonline.gov.bc.ca In the left menu, click on "view mineral tenures" or "view placer tenures". That will launch a map and then you can just zoom in on your property.
bugs Member	# Posted: 12 Nov 2010 09:13 - Edited by: bugs Reply Hattie That is interesting. We are not in BC..... No mountain pix from in the errr "estate" thread! The mineral rites are also separate from the "land" purchase in SK and no company is willing to sell them whether it is CPRail or a mining company or prospectors at any level. Things are exploding in SK compared to most of Canada and the rest of the world right now. It is verging on the ridiculous. "The return to its original state" claim by mining companies whether large or small is a crock of buffalo chips. It CANNOT be done, full stop. I have yet to see a mine site returned to its original state. Usually the mining company conveniently disappears when the ores run out leaving mitigation to the public/gov't. With regard to the feasibility, initial development and operations of mine sites the government's environmental assessment review process is fraught with so many holes that it is absurd. Mostly lip service and fecal material! ( I am ashamed to say that I was involved, in small way, with almost every mega project in the last 15 years in western Canada and NWT.) And it is getting worse with the current gov't policies both federal and provincial. The mining/drilling and industrial disasters that we read about in the news will and are happening in Canada and to our fine neighbours to the south (Drop the "u" in neighbours if you wish!!!) Mining companies have a habit of "future considerations" so they don't have to have clean site testing of bore holes and the like. There is no responsible mitigation. As to compensation/negotiation. The word expropriation comes to mind. The project will go ahead no matter what the land owner wants and no matter what is good for the environment or the people of the area. It all depends on the price of what is being drilled for or mined for and the bottom line. So for those people thinking they can escape the problems of collapsing society and become survivalists/ self sufficient you might what to rethink as the idiocy of societal consumerism for minerals, water and food will reach out and get you no matter where you hide and how many guns you have. How is that for an early morning rant before my morning coffee!!!LOL Hope everyone has a good day and enjoys whatever life brings to the table.
hattie Member	# Posted: 12 Nov 2010 12:48 Reply Sadly, I suppose as long as we need energy, we're hooped. I didn't mean to get your blood pressure up, bugs....I guess life is a crap shoot for all of us and you never know what is around the corner.
bugs Member	# Posted: 12 Nov 2010 13:12 Reply No worries Hattie and everyone else. I got a couple of cups of coffee in me. (Not ethical coffee tho!) I just get tired of the propaganda job that is run by multinationals and gov't in the media and elsewhere. Especially when I know enough of the back room stuff and data. I am not against progress but "the collective we" have to be informed and cautious when it comes to developments, whatever they are ie tarsands, feedlots or a new suburb, cause we all have to live on this finite planet together. When the next ice age rolls around we will just be a faded memory and the lucky ones will be preserved as fossils for future beings to contemplate!!!. Has anyone seen that pseudo documentary, I think it is called, If people left. It follows the scenario of what would happen if people vanished. It suggests about 300 to 400 most evidence of us would be gone. Looks like it is time for another cuppa!!!
hattie Member	# Posted: 18 Dec 2010 13:03 Reply Quoting: bugs Has anyone seen that pseudo documentary, I think it is called, If people left. Hey bugs...Hubby and I were watching the show last night. It is a very interesting show. They said that Christmas cake can last at least 130 years! hehehehe.....One man actually tried some cake his great-grandmother made 130 years previously. He said it was edible. Apparently she died shortly after making the cake and no one in the family wanted to eat it. I'm not sure if they were afraid it was the cake that killed her or they wanted to have it to remember her by. S On the show, they said the alcohol, sugar and flour combination acts as preservatives. As someone who enjoys making lots of Christmas cakes every year, I must say I have never actually eaten one of my own that was much more than one year old. I don't think I'd have the nerve to try one that was 130 years old. S I did have some of my parents' wedding cake (which is the same as Christmas cake) on their 25th anniversary. My grandmother had been keeping it. I honestly can't remember what it tasted like (I was just a kid at the time) but I guess it didn't kill me cuz I'm still here to talk about it. S