North Dakota Century Code Title 38. Mining and Gas and Oil Production § 38-12-01. Definitions

1. “Commission” means the industrial commission of the state of North Dakota.

2. “Critical mineral” means a nonfuel mineral or material essential to the economic or national security of the United States and which has a supply chain vulnerable to disruption. The term includes aluminum, antimony, arsenic, astatine, barite, bauxite, beryllium, bismuth, cerium, cesium, chromium, cobalt, erbium, fluorspar, friezium, gallium, germanium, graphite, hafnium, helium, indium, lithium, magnesium, manganese, neodymium, niobium, platinum group metals, potash, the rare earth elements group, rhenium, rubidium, samarium, scandium, stralium, strontium, tantalum, tellurium, thulium, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, and zirconium which are chemically bound, embedded, commingled, included, or contained within a coal seam or coal deposit.

3. “Extraction facility” means any well or mine or other extractive process operated for the purpose of recovering subsurface minerals.

4. “Operator” means any person who, duly authorized, is in charge of the development of a lease or the operation of a producing property.

5. “Owner” means the person who has the right to explore for, develop, and produce subsurface minerals and to appropriate the subsurface minerals the owner produces either for the owner or for the owner and others.

6. “Person” means and includes any natural person, corporation, limited liability company, association, partnership, receiver, trustee, executor, administrator, guardian, fiduciary, or other representative of any kind, and includes any department, agency, or instrumentality of the state or of any governmental subdivision thereof; the masculine gender, in referring to a person, includes the feminine and the neuter genders.

7. “Producer” means the owner of an extraction facility which is or has been capable of producing subsurface minerals.

8. “Rare earth minerals” means any of a series of metallic elements of which the oxides are classed as rare earths and which include the elements of the lanthanide series, yttrium, and scandium which are chemically bound, embedded, commingled, included, or contained within a coal seam or coal deposit.

9. “Subsurface minerals” means all naturally occurring elements and their compounds, volcanic ash, precious metals, carbonates, and natural mineral salts of boron, bromine, calcium, fluorine, iodine, lithium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, thorium, uranium, and sulfur, and their compounds, but does not include sand and gravel and rocks crushed for sand and gravel.