If a horizontal well two sections away has started paying you, or a landman has told you your minerals are "in a unit," a spacing order is the reason. It is the single document that decides which tracts share a well's production and in what proportion, and it is public.
The Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation, on an operator's application, establishes a spacing unit: a defined area that one well or a set of wells is allowed to drain. Everyone who owns minerals inside the unit shares in every well drilled in it, in proportion to their acreage, whether the wellbore crosses their tract or not.
Montana spacing units in the Bakken side of the Williston Basin (Richland, Roosevelt) follow North Dakota's 1,280-acre pattern; older fields such as Cut Bank, Kevin-Sunburst and Bowdoin sit on 40- and 160-acre patterns with vertical wells, which is why a Montana owner can hold a large decimal in a tiny unit.
Your royalty decimal on a unit well is your net mineral acres in the unit ÷ total unit acres × your royalty rate. A 40-acre tract in a 1,280-acre unit at a 3/16 royalty is 40 ÷ 1,280 × 0.1875 = 0.005859. When operators enlarge a unit for longer laterals, the denominator grows and each owner's decimal shrinks — while the number of wells that pay you usually grows too.
Inside a unit, owners who have not leased can be pooled by order under MCA § 82-11-202: the Board can pool interests in a spacing unit on application; an owner who declines to participate is carried and pays a risk penalty out of production before receiving working-interest revenue. Whether to lease before a pooling hearing or to go unleased is a real decision with real money on both sides; get advice from someone who works in Montana specifically, because the rules differ state to state.
Orders are indexed by case or docket number and by the sections they cover. The practical way in is by section: find every order that names your section, township and range, then read the unit boundary and the wells approved in it. Our map shades approved units and lists their wells where the state publishes the geometry; click your section and the units that include it appear with the order reference.
Yes, if your tract is inside the well's spacing unit. Production is shared across the whole unit by acreage, not by where the wellbore runs.
On the MBOGC website under the case or docket number. Our map keeps the order reference on each unit so you can go straight to it.
You are pooled anyway, on the statutory terms rather than terms you negotiated. In Montana that means an owner who declines to participate is carried and pays a risk penalty out of production before receiving working-interest revenue.