878
Opinion of the Court
continued the tradition begun in the 1909 and 1910 Acts of reserving only those minerals enumerated in the statute. See ibid.; Act of July 17, 1914, 38 Stat. 509, as amended, 30 U. S. C. §§ 121-123 (providing that "[l]ands withdrawn or classified as phosphate, nitrate, potash, oil, gas, or asphaltic minerals, or which are valuable for those deposits," could be patented, subject to a reservation to the United States of "the deposits on account of which the lands so patented were withdrawn or classified or reported as valuable"). It was not until 1916 that Congress passed a public lands Act containing a general reservation of valuable minerals in the lands. See Stock-Raising Homestead Act, ch. 9, 39 Stat. 862, as amended, 43 U. S. C. § 299 (reserving "all the coal and other minerals in the lands" in all lands patented under the Act). See also Western Nuclear, 462 U. S., at 49 ("Unlike the preceding statutes containing mineral reservations, the [1916 Stock-Raising Homestead Act] was not limited to lands classified as mineral in character, and it did not reserve only specifically identified minerals").
C
Respondents contend that Congress did not reserve the solid coal but convey the CBM gas because the resulting split estate would be impractical and would make mining the coal difficult because the miners would have to capture and preserve the CBM gas that escaped during mining. See, e. g., Brief for Respondent Southern Ute Indian Tribe 46; see also id., at 25-26 (emphasizing that the reservation includes the right to "mine" the coal, indicating that "Congress reserved all rights needed to develop the underlying coal" including the right to vent CBM gas during mining). We doubt Congress would have given much consideration to these problems, however, because—as noted above—it does not appear to have given consideration to the possibility that CBM gas would one day be a profitable energy source developed on a large scale.
Page: Index Previous 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007