§ 127.007.Owner of Surface Estate

The chapter’s final saving clause, and it protects the party with the least control over what happens.

This chapter does not deprive an owner of the surface estate of the right to secure indemnity from a lessee, an operator, a contractor, or other person conducting operations for the exploration or production of minerals of the owner’s land.

The provision reflects the split estate, which is the ordinary position in Texas. Mineral rights are frequently severed from the surface, and the mineral estate is dominant — the owner of the minerals has the right to use as much of the surface as is reasonably necessary to reach them.

So a surface owner may find drilling on their land without having agreed to it, and without any say in who does the work or how.

Indemnity is the surface owner’s protection in that position, and this section keeps it available.

The reasoning is the same one that produced the chapter, applied in the other direction. The chapter voids indemnity where a stronger party imposes it on a weaker one seeking work. A surface owner is not seeking work; they are being operated upon.

The list is broad — lessee, operator, contractor, or other person conducting operations — so the right runs against whoever is on the land rather than only against the party the surface owner dealt with.

Note what the section does and does not do. It preserves the right to secure indemnity, meaning to bargain for it. It does not create an indemnity where none was agreed.