Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Related legal acts

Key definition

Licence definition

What does Licence mean? A licence is permission, granted by contract or law, to do something that would otherwise be unlawful, without creating a proprietary interest. In practice, lawyers most often see: licences over land (a personal, usually non‑assignable permission—often a contractual licence—to occupy or use property, distinguished in case law from a lease and generally revocable subject to contract and proprietary estoppel); intellectual property licences (permission to use copyright, trade marks or patents on agreed terms); and regulatory licences. Regulatory use varies across the UK and Ireland. In England and Wales, the Legal Services Act 2007 requires an Alternative Business Structure (ABS) to hold...

Unitisation on the UKCS: NSTA powers, pre‑unitisation agreements, UUOAs versus JOAs, tract participation, determination and redetermination

Published by a LexisNexis Energy expert

Practice notes

Introduction

Typically, oil and gas Licence holders put in place separate joint operating Agreements (JOA) to govern their relationship and the way they intend to collaborate on exploration, development and production under a particular licence. For broader guidance on joint operating agreements in the Sector, see Practice Notes: The purpose and the principles of the joint operating agreement and Joint operating agreement—key clauses.

There are, however, situations where hydrocarbon Reserves ‘straddle’ two or more licences that would otherwise be unrelated. In such cases, the following connected questions arise:

how parties under different licences can produce hydrocarbons from these fields while sharing an objective of maximising potential without needlessly depleting the field
how any revenues generated by operations conducted across two (or more) distinct licences should be allocated
how to establish the respective interests of each licence holder

To address these matters, the oil and gas industry has developed the concept of a ‘unitisation and unit operating agreement’.

Participating interest, track participation and unit interest

Unitisation in the oil and gas...

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Web page updated on 22/05/2026

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