Easements & Rights-of-Way

What is a dormant pipeline easement worth?

Old pipeline easements don't expire just because the pipe stopped flowing. For landowners and rights holders, that can be a problem—or a payday.

LAB Midstream · Insights · July 2026

Pipeline easements outlive pipelines. A right-of-way granted in 1965 for a gas line that stopped flowing in 1998 is, in many cases, still a live legal interest today—still encumbering the land, still assignable, still capable of carrying a new use. Most people on both sides of that easement have stopped thinking about it. That's exactly why it may be worth something.

If you're the landowner

A dormant easement crossing your property is a cloud on your land: it can complicate development, financing, and sale, and the pipe under it—if it's still there—is a question every buyer's inspector will ask about. You generally have a few paths. You can pursue termination or release, which depends heavily on the easement's language and state law and often requires the current holder's cooperation. You can wait. Or, in the right circumstances, you can sell your position—or work with a buyer who acquires the easement from its current holder and resolves the encumbrance, sometimes removing the pipe in the process.

What your position is worth depends on the easement's terms (exclusive or not, assignable or not, abandoned by its terms or not), the land's use and value, and whether the corridor itself has forward-looking value to anyone. There is no blue-book price. That's precisely why a direct conversation with a knowledgeable buyer beats guessing.

If you hold the easement

Operators, estates, and successor companies frequently hold portfolios of easements attached to lines that will never flow again. Those instruments cost money to keep—payments, records, landowner relations—and produce nothing. But an assignable easement along a corridor with future relevance is a sellable asset. Buyers exist for exactly these positions, particularly along routes where carbon capture, hydrogen, water, fiber, or industrial growth may one day want a path that already exists.

What determines the price

Five things, mostly: continuity (a connected corridor is worth far more than a fragment), transferability (the easement's own language governs), location (growth corridors and constrained geographies command premiums), the condition and status of any pipe still in the ground, and the cleanliness of the paper trail. A holder who can produce the original instruments, amendments, and a clear chain of title will always get a better price than one selling a mystery.

How LAB Midstream approaches it

LAB Midstream purchases pipeline easements, rights-of-way, and corridor property interests directly, where legally transferable and commercially viable—from operators, estates, successor entities, and landowners. Our background is in pipeline decommissioning and salvage, which means we can evaluate the whole position: the paper, the pipe, and the path. Conversations are confidential, valuations are disciplined, and we'll tell you honestly if we're not the right buyer.