Is it illegal to slant drill or directional drill for Oil or gas in Texas?
You need to check the Oil Drilling regulations of the Texas Railroad Commission (despite the name, it is the state agency that controls oil wells and the oil industry in the state of Texas. )They promulgate specific regulations regarding practices like “slant hole drilling”, since a famous case in Texas on this subject back in 1961, which established the law in the state on that subject.. the Railroad Commission worked on some of its most interesting regulatory problems in the 1960s. One case that captured the public’s imagination was the so-called “slant hole” drilling case in East Texas in 1961. A total of 93 wells were found to have been drilled at an angle in order to pump oil from underneath neighboring property. Faced with this new technique of stealing, the legislature passed a law stating that a well could not deviate more than three degrees from the vertical. See, 43 Texas Law Review, 772. Ralph W. Dau and Shannon H. Ratliff, Pipeline and Lender Liability for Slant-Hole Produc
