Who owns the west?

Getty Oil Co

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Getty Oil Co is one of 92,125 beneficiaries of a 132-year-old federal mining law that gives away precious metals, minerals, and even the title to the land itself for less than $10 an acre. Getty Oil Co owns the minerals under an estimated 1,756 acres of claimed land, and gained title to an estimated 763 acres of lands previously owned by the public giving Getty Oil Co more total land holdings (claims and patents) than 98.9% of all other mining interests.

Headquarters

3810 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90010

Partners Include

Kerr McGee Corp, Petrotomics Co, Skelly Oil Co, Sequoyah Fuels Corp, Power Resources Inc, Tidewater Oil Co

Information on subsidiaries and parent companies shown here represents our best estimate of corporate structure at the time of this website release, and are drawn from various publicly available sources. Please report any noted omissions and errors to EWG with a credible source or citation. Thank you.

Overview of Ownership

 ClaimsPatentsMining Plans & Notices
Number85 7 0
Estimated Acreage1,756 763 0
States
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11111111
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Source: EWG analysis of US BLM data.

Claims

Like all U.S. claimholders, Getty Oil Co acquired ownership of precious metals and minerals on U.S. public land for about $2 per acre, and maintains possession of the claim with a small per-acre fee, typically $5 each year. Getty Oil Co pays no royalties to the federal government for metals and minerals mined from this land.

For Getty Oil Co:

Claims by State.

StateNumber of ClaimsEstimated AcreageDate(s)
Wyoming 851,7561957 - 1973
U.S. Total 851,7561957 - 1973

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Source: EWG analysis of US BLM data.


Patents

Getty Oil Co is one of 63,768 beneficiaries of a long-standing federal subsidy called "patenting" that allows mining interests to purchase public land for no more than $5 an acre. Since acquiring title to the land, Getty Oil Co may have mined it, sold it, leased it, or passed it on to heirs or other corporate interests. Regardless of who owns the property now, the U.S. public has lost all rights- metals, minerals, and title - on land that was once public park or forest.

For Getty Oil Co:

Patents by State.

StateNumber of PatentsEstimated AcreageDate(s)
Wyoming 77631968 - 1986
U.S. Total 77631968 - 1986

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Source: EWG analysis of US BLM data.



Source: EWG analysis of Bureau of Land Management's Land and Mineral Records 2000 (LR2000) data system. For claims, acreages are estimated based on maximum allowable size of claims. For patents, acreages are taken directly from the LR2000 database where available, and are estimated based on maximum allowable size of claim that preceded the patent where acreages are not noted in LR2000. All notices are assumed to be five acres in size, and the size of plans are calculated directly as the size of the land represented by the legal land description in the LR2000 database. The acreages we estimate through these methods would tend to overestimate the actual amount. We welcome corrections here, and would welcome a federal data management system that included the acreages involved in these important federal land transactions.