A law quietly passed this summer aimed to end a complicated, decade-plus legal fight over who owns an estimated $1 billion in Pennsylvania natural gas. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.
At issue are mineral rights — which give holders the right to extract coal, oil, gas, or ore — underneath as few as 60,000 acres to more than one million, depending on which side you ask.
For years, a group of families, led by the Proctor family trust, has waged a legal battle with the state over mineral rights that they say their ancestors acquired more than a century ago. The property in question was severed from the surface rights, which govern the ability to build a home, chop wood, or hunt on a piece of land. It now sits under a swathe of state game land.
The Proctors won a unanimous state Supreme Court case in May 2025 against the Pennsylvania Game Commission, which confirmed that the trust still holds the mineral rights to the land.
But a year later, the legislature undid the decision as it passed a flurry of budget-related bills in just 24 hours.
“I ask, what is the sudden rush?” wrote Sherman Powell, a Pennsylvania resident and member of the Proctor family, on behalf of the family trust in a June letter to senators opposing a draft of the bill. “This legislation does not solve a public emergency or improve government services. Instead, it is designed to transfer valuable private property rights from citizens to government and private entities.”
In a legal filing, the Shapiro administration said the 2025 ruling wouldn’t just apply to the Proctor family trust’s land. It estimated that up to 1 million acres of state park and forest land, along with their associated royalties, could be affected.
Those royalties are an important source of state funding. Almost half of the Game Commission’s annual funding in the 2024-25 fiscal year, about $100 million, came from natural resource development, including gas leases. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which manages state forests and parks, brings in about the same each year from gas drilling alone.
A spokesperson for the trust said the administration’s estimate appears to be “based completely upon speculation.”
Still, the ruling’s potential impact led the state’s powerful natural gas lobby to support the new law, Act 27.
In legal filings, drilling firm EQT and the industry’s trade group, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, argued the ruling created an unacceptable lack of clarity about state property laws for owners, public or private, who have leased land for oil and gas production.
A spokesperson for the coalition told Spotlight PA ahead of Act 27’s signing that the law will “provide certainty to current Pennsylvania property owners that acquired their property interests in accordance with the laws of the Commonwealth.”
Before the bill became law, state Sen. Gene Yaw (R., Lycoming), an ally of the powerful gas industry and chair of the upper chamber’s environmental committee, was direct about what he believes are the 2025 Supreme Court ruling’s implications.
“Every piece of property in that whole section of the state is exposed to that ruling in some fashion,” Yaw told Spotlight PA last month. “In Lycoming County, there are 52,000 parcels of land. Every one of those parcels, in some fashion, is subject to the Proctor issue.”
Yaw served as the county’s solicitor for years, and previously proposed legislation to “provide a surface owner of land with an advantage at the start of a court case where the ownership of mineral or oil and gas rights is unclear or unknown.” He has also argued that the separation of surface and mineral rights can be an “obstacle” to gas development.
In a July legal filing, the Game Commission rejected the claim that it had “acted as some nefarious puppeteer pulling the strings of the General Assembly and”