Sell Mineral Rights in Pennsylvania

Two Pennsylvania owners with identical acreage can get very different net checks, and the difference is almost always in the deduction line, not the well.

Pennsylvania's Marcellus shale is a dry gas play across most of its productive footprint, running through the northeast counties like Susquehanna, Bradford, and Wyoming, and again through the southwest around Washington and Greene counties where it sits closer to some wet-gas and Utica activity underneath. Wells here, drilled by operators including Cabot's successor Coterra, EQT, and Chesapeake's legacy assets among others, were largely leased and developed during the 2008 through 2015 boom, which means most owners have years of check-stub history to work from, not a guess.

What we look at first isn't the gross production number, it's the net. Pennsylvania leases from that era were written with wide variation in how post-production costs, gathering, compression, dehydration, transportation, get handled, and two neighbors with the same lateral running under both their tracts can see meaningfully different net royalties depending on their specific lease language.

Post-production deductions and what they do to your check

A lot of Pennsylvania Marcellus leases signed in the early boom years allow the operator to deduct a proportionate share of gathering, compression, and transportation costs before calculating your royalty, which means your check reflects a net-back price, not the wellhead gas price you might see quoted in the news. This is standard, lease-driven, and not a sign of anything wrong, but it does mean we read your actual check stub deduction lines rather than assume your interest nets out at a textbook royalty rate. Some older leases have no deduction language at all and pay closer to gross, which is worth more per unit of production. We check which kind you have before we quote.

If you're unsure how your deductions compare to a neighbor's, that's genuinely hard to know without seeing both lease documents side by side, and we’d rather look at your actual numbers than guess.

Dry gas economics and where your acreage sits

Because most of Pennsylvania's Marcellus production is dry gas without the natural gas liquids that boost value in wetter parts of the play further west, your royalty tracks gas price directly, with no NGL cushion in a downturn. Northeast Pennsylvania counties are almost entirely dry gas; the southwest corner sees somewhat richer gas and proximity to Utica shale development underneath the Marcellus in some counties, which occasionally means a two-formation opportunity on the same tract.

Impact fees, not severance tax, and what that means for you

Pennsylvania doesn't levy a state severance tax on natural gas production the way most other major gas states do; instead it collects a per-well impact fee under Act 13 that's paid by the operator, not deducted from your royalty. That's a structural difference worth knowing, since it means your net check isn't carrying a state severance tax deduction the way an Oklahoma or Texas check might. Talk to your CPA or tax advisor about how a mineral sale affects your specific Pennsylvania income tax situation before you sign anything, since that's outside what we can advise on.

Non-producing acreage and title through the recorder of deeds

Non-producing Marcellus acreage still exists in Pennsylvania, mostly in counties on the play's outer edge or where an owner's tract fell outside a drilled unit. We price it against nearby permitting rather than production that doesn't exist for that tract. On title, Pennsylvania's older family farms often carry mineral severances going back generations, sometimes separate from the surface entirely, so we confirm your deed's legal description against your lease or division order through the county recorder of deeds before we get to closing.