## Facts

- Central Kentucky Natural Gas Company developed a large natural-gas field in Menifee and adjoining Kentucky counties, leasing most of the acreage.
- By about 1919, the company had exhausted the field’s native gas.
- The company later transported gas from other fields and injected it through existing wells into the depleted underground reservoir, withdrawing it when needed for distribution.
- Della Hammonds owned a 54-acre tract located within the field’s boundaries; the underground geological structure forming the reservoir extended beneath her land.
- Hammonds never leased her land to the company and alleged the company placed gas in or under her property without her consent.
- Hammonds sought monetary recovery for trespass and “use and occupation,” asserting the storage operation amounted to a continuing invasion of her subsurface.

## Issues

1. Whether a gas company commits trespass by injecting and storing gas in a depleted natural reservoir when the reservoir extends beneath land the company does not own or lease.
2. Whether reinjected gas, once returned to a natural geological reservoir, remains the personal property of the injector or reverts to fugitive status governed by capture and control.

## Decision

- The Kentucky Court of Appeals affirmed judgment for the gas company.
- The court held that reinjected gas placed into the depleted natural reservoir resumed a fugitive character associated with natural gas in place.
- Because the injector lacked exclusive ownership of the gas while it migrated within the reservoir, the company was not liable in trespass merely because the stored gas occupied or moved beneath Hammonds’s tract.

## Legal Principles

- Oil and gas are treated as fugitive resources: ownership depends on possession and control, and title is lost when the substance escapes control and moves beyond the owner’s dominion.
- Possession of the surface estate does not necessarily constitute possession of subsurface gas; control through capture is central to enforceable ownership claims.
- When gas is reinjected into a natural underground reservoir, it may be treated as returning to a fugitive condition within that geological structure, making capture—rather than location under a specific tract—the operative basis for claims of ownership.
- Without exclusive ownership of the stored gas while in situ, a landowner generally cannot recover trespass damages or “use and occupation” compensation solely based on the gas’s subsurface presence within a common reservoir.

## Conclusion

The court rejected a landowner’s trespass and rental-value theory against a utility that injected imported gas into a depleted underground reservoir, holding that reinjected gas in a natural formation reverts to a fugitive status and does not support trespass liability for its migration beneath an unleased tract within the reservoir.


Hammonds v. Cent. Ky. Nat. Gas Co., 255 Ky. 685, 75 S.W.2d 204 (Ky. Ct. App. 1934)