Opinion ID: 543116
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Casinghead Entries.

Text: 36 As Bennett compiled much of his list of sales prices from severance tax reports, he often directed his attention almost exclusively to price and overlooked particular features of the transactions that might distinguish the sale from what a hypothetical sale from the Thomasville plant would be like. Among the most glaring errors found by the district court was the use of casinghead gas sales in this list of sales prices with which Bennett intended to establish the market for a comparable gas sales. With its higher BTU value, casinghead gas was worth more per mcf than the sweet gas produced by the Thomasville plant. Thus the inclusion of casinghead gas sales resulted in artificially high sweet gas market value estimates, undermining the royalty owners' attempts to establish a market value for sweet gas in Mississippi. 37 Although, if BTU values are known, casinghead gas prices can be used as an indicator of sweet gas prices, Bennett did not attempt to modify his results by making the appropriate adjustments for gas of differing BTU values. 5 Rather, in response to the criticism of his use of casinghead prices, Bennett argued that even without the inclusion of the casinghead gas entries, his study still would establish a market price for sweet gas in Mississippi consistently higher than those prices at which gas was actually sold from the Thomasville plant. This is a reasonable contention: Although the deletion of the casinghead entries would diminish the ultimate market value established by the royalty owners, the remainder of the sales listed in the Bennett study (were they truly comparable to the sales from the Thomasville plant) still would have established a market value higher than Shell's contract price and thus would have entitled the royalty owners to some damages. 38