Most people who are selling their mineral rights this is a once-in-a-lifetime transaction. The people who are buying the landmen who are coming in do it every day. So there's a little inequity there about knowledge.

When a nation is over-reliant on one or two commodities like oil or precious minerals corrupt government ministers and their dodgy associates hoard profits and taxes instead of properly allocating them to schools and hospitals.

God sleeps in the minerals awakens in plants walks in animals and thinks in man.

I was born and raised in the high desert of Nevada in a tiny town called Searchlight. My dad was a hard rock miner. My mom took in wash. I grew up around people of strong values - even if they rarely talked about them.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

The meek shall inherit the Earth but not its mineral rights.

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

It proved easier to buy the farm to get the mineral rights than to buy the coal rights alone.