Mineral Leasing Act
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Mineral Leasing Act
The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 et seq. is a United States federal law that authorizes and governs lease, leasing of public lands for developing deposits of coal, petroleum, natural gas and other hydrocarbons, in addition to phosphates, sodium, sulfur, and potassium in the United States. Previous to the act, these materials were subject to mining claims under the General Mining Act of 1872. Background Previous to the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, the General Mining Act of 1872 authorized citizens to freely prospect for minerals on public lands and allowed a discoverer to stake claims to both minerals and surrounding lands for development. This open-access policy enabled a major oil rush in the West, in 1909 prompting USGS, U.S. Geological Survey Director George Otis Smith to warn Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger that oil lands were being claimed so quickly they would be unavailable within a few months. Ballinger notified William Howard Taft, President Taft who prom ...
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Mineral Lands And Mining
In geology and mineralogy, a mineral or mineral species is, broadly speaking, a solid substance with a fairly well-defined chemical composition and a specific crystal structure that occurs naturally in pure form.John P. Rafferty, ed. (2011): Minerals'; p. 1. In the series ''Geology: Landforms, Minerals, and Rocks''. Rosen Publishing Group. The geological definition of mineral normally excludes compounds that occur only in living organisms. However, some minerals are often biogenic (such as calcite) or organic compounds in the sense of chemistry (such as mellite). Moreover, living organisms often synthesize inorganic minerals (such as hydroxylapatite) that also occur in rocks. The concept of mineral is distinct from rock, which is any bulk solid geologic material that is relatively homogeneous at a large enough scale. A rock may consist of one type of mineral or may be an aggregate of two or more different types of minerals, spacially segregated into distinct phases. Some n ...
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