North Dakota mineral owners say oil companies unfairly keep millions from checks without oversight

Public officials have refused to take action for years, which some attribute to the industry’s outsize influence on the state

BY:JACOB ORLEDGE AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARAHBETH MANEY, PROPUBLICA-AUGUST 4, 2025

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories in your inbox every week.

For more than half a century, Diana Skarphol’s family received a check every month from the company that drilled the first successful oil well in North Dakota on their land in 1951.

The checks, from the company that became Hess Corp., were straightforward. Her family, which owns the oil and gas underground, received a percentage of the revenue generated from the company’s sale of the minerals, called a royalty.

But in April 2015, when she opened that month’s check and looked at the accompanying statement detailing her share, she noticed for the first time that a significant portion of the payment had been deducted. About 35% of what she thought she was owed was gone, and she didn’t know why. 

She was so taken aback that she called her husband, Bob Skarphol, a state lawmaker on the verge of retirement, as he drove from the Capitol in Bismarck to their home in Tioga, a small community in the oil-rich Bakken in the western part of the state. 

“Why are there minuses?” Diana Skarphol recalls asking. “Rather than being added in, things were being subtracted. I was puzzled and confused.”

Read Full Article

They can’t get answers from the oil industry. North Dakota’s oversight program hasn’t helped.

Program has not resolved a single case related to royalty deductions

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories in your inbox every week.

One morning in February 2023, a small group of mineral owners arrived at the North Dakota Capitol on a mission. They had traveled from across the state and other parts of the country to explain to lawmakers how the powerful oil and gas companies had been chipping away at their income.

It’s not easy to recruit people to testify during the winter months of the legislative session. Ranchers are busy with the calving season. Snowbirds have relocated to warmer climates. It’s a more than three-hour drive for those living in the Bakken oil field. 

But those who made it to Bismarck lined up at a podium to share details of their own experiences and the broader concerns affecting the estimated 300,000 people who receive money from the industry in exchange for the right to their underground minerals. For nearly a decade, they had grappled with companies withholding significant portions of their royalty payments without explaining how they determined how much to deduct, as the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica reported last week. 

Now they were at the Capitol for a specific reason: They wanted legislators to require companies to provide more information so owners could discern if they were being paid correctly, and to impose penalties if companies failed to comply. 

Shane Leverenz, who manages income his extended family receives from numerous oil wells, read aloud email responses from companies to illustrate the lack of cooperation mineral owners face when they request information. “We are not obligated to mail each owner a calculation as to how their interest was calculated,” one company wrote. 

Read Full Article

Some states restrict the oil industry from taking mineral owners’ earnings. Not North Dakota.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories in your inbox every week.

Millions of Americans own the rights to oil and gas underground. When they’re approached by an energy company to lease out those rights, they’re offered a cut of the revenue, called a royalty. 

“Royalties saved our place,” said James Horob, a farmer in northwest North Dakota, who used oil royalties to rescue his family’s farm from bankruptcy in 2008 and replace equipment that had been auctioned off. “We’re lucky to have what we got.” 

However, the royalty income that mineral owners like Horob get can depend in part on the state where they live. In North Dakota, estimates show that in recent years companies have been deducting hundreds of millions of dollars annually to help cover the costs incurred once oil and gas leave the ground on their way to being sold. North Dakota officials have not stepped in to help royalty owners, even though the state, in its own leases, has explicitly prohibited oil and gas companies from taking deductions from government royalty payments since 1979, as the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica reported this month. 

“It’s tough to think that there isn’t some better solution out there than what we currently have,” said Aaron Weber, a Watford City-based attorney who represents mineral owners in North Dakota. 

In contrast to North Dakota, at least seven oil-and-gas-producing states have taken either legislative or judicial action to restrict the costs that can be deducted from royalty owners’ checks. Here are the key ways North Dakota differs from these other states when it comes to protecting the interests of royalty owners:

Read Full Article

Mission

The mission of WBROA is to educate and encourage Williston Basin Royalty Owners to engage with statewide elected officials, legislators and members of the Judiciary for purpose of providing insight into the expectations of their constituency.

Purpose

The purpose of WBROA is to help enable Royalty Owners to develop the skillset to comfortably communicate their frustrations and expectations when discussing the treatment of the royalty payment issues in question.

Become a member

Join us today!

Membership has it's advantages.

Join us