Faith Ranch and Farms Fund, Inc. v. PNC Bank, N.A.

Due to the rise of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking“) and horizontal drilling, Ohio has become the largest oil-producing state east of the Mississippi and the eighth largest oil-and-gas producer overall. In this case, Emmett represented the appellee in the most important oil-and-gas-rights appeal taken up by the Ohio Supreme Court in decades.

Faith Ranch owns more than 4,000 acres of land in Harrison County, Ohio, in the heart of Ohio’s portion of the oil-and-gas rich Marcellus Shale Formation. Though Faith Ranch has owned the property for more than 50 years, heirs of a prior owner—who had sold the land in 1953 but had reserved the right to “mine and remove” certain “coal and other minerals of any vein” under the land—argued that they, not Faith Ranch, had the right to lease the land for oil and gas development.

The issue on appeal before the Ohio Supreme Court was whether the deed reservation of “coal and other minerals of any vein” included oil and gas rights. Ably represented by Carl Frankovitch in the lower courts, Faith Ranch retained Emmett as co-counsel at the Ohio Supreme Court, hiring him to draft its brief before that Court. The brief and case required in-depth textual analysis of the deed reservation, an overview of historical usage, and extensive research and argument related to the precise meanings of “mineral,” “vein,” “mine,” and other terms that are ubiquitous in deeds, contracts, and other instruments in the oil and gas industries. Ultimately, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled, 6-to-1, in favor of Faith Ranch, agreeing with Emmett’s argument that, in the specific context of this 1953 deed reservation, the term “minerals” did not include oil-and-gas rights.