47-318 DEFINITIONS.
MINES AND MINING
CHAPTER 3
OIL AND GAS WELLS -- GEOLOGIC INFORMATION, AND PREVENTION OF WASTE
47-318. Definitions. Unless the context otherwise requires, the terms defined in this section shall have the following meaning when used in this act:
(a) The word "Commission" shall mean the oil and gas conservation commission.
(b) "Waste" as applied to oil means and includes underground waste; inefficient, excessive or improper use or dissipation of reservoir energy, including gas energy and water drive; surface waste, open-pit storage, and waste incident to the production of oil in excess of the producer’s above-ground storage facilities and lease and contractural requirements, but excluding storage (other than open-pit storage) reasonably necessary for building up and maintaining crude stocks and products thereof for consumption, use and sale; the locating, drilling, equipping, operating, or producing of any well in a manner that causes, or tends to cause, reduction of the quantity of oil or gas ultimately recoverable from a pool under prudent and proper operations.
(c) "Waste" as applied to gas shall include the escape, blowing or releasing, directly or indirectly, into the open air of gas from wells productive of gas only, or gas in an excessive or unreasonable amount from wells producing oil or both oil and gas; and the production of gas in quantities or in such manner as will unreasonably reduce reservoir pressure or unreasonably diminish the quantity of oil or gas that might ultimately be produced; excepting gas that is reasonably necessary in the drilling, completing and testing of wells and in furnishing power for the production of wells.
(d) "Person" means any natural person, corporation, association, partnership, receiver, trustee, executor, administrator, guardian, fiduciary, or other representatives of any kind, and includes any government or any political subdivision of any agency thereof. The masculine gender, in referring to a person, includes the feminine and the neuter genders.
(e) "Oil" means crude petroleum oil and all other hydrocarbons, regardless of gravity, that are produced in liquid form by ordinary production methods, but does not include liquid hydrocarbons that were originally in a gaseous phase in the reservoir.
(f) "Gas" means all natural gas and all other fluid hydrocarbons not hereinabove defined as oil, including condensate because it originally was in the gaseous phase in the reservoir.
(g) "Condensate" means liquid hydrocarbons that were originally in the gaseous phase in the reservoir.
(h) "Pool" means an underground reservoir containing a common accumulation of oil or gas or both; each zone of a structure that is completely separated from any other zone in the same structure is a pool.
(i) "Field" means the general area underlaid by one or more pools.
(j) "Owner" means the person who has the right to drill into and produce from a pool and to appropriate the oil or gas that he produces therefrom, either for himself or for himself and others.
(k) "Producer" means the owner of a well or wells capable of producing oil or gas or both.
(l) "Just and equitable share of the production" means, as to each person, that part of the production from the pool that is substantially in the proportion that the amount of recoverable oil or gas or both in the developed area of his tract or tracts in the pool bears to the recoverable oil or gas or both in the total of the developed areas in the pool.
(m) "Developed area" means a spacing unit on which a well has been completed that is capable of producing oil or gas, or the acreage that is otherwise attributed to a well by the commission.
(n) "Correlative rights" means the owners’ or producers’ just and equitable share in a pool.
(o) "Oil and gas" means oil or gas or both.
(p) The use of the plural includes the singular, and the use of the singular includes the plural.