by an Osage citizen
In Osage County the ground is owned twice: the surface by whoever holds it, and everything beneath by the Osage Nation. That split, set in 1906, is why a wind farm was ordered torn down and why a Google data center now needs the Osage Minerals Council’s permission to dig. This page sets out what the enacted law, the court record and the public statements establish about the estate below the surface and the development arriving on top of it. Written September 3, 2026.
A reservation split in two
Osage County and the Osage Reservation are the same ground, and beneath all of it the minerals belong to the Nation. The Osage Constitution states it in Article XV, Section 2:
"The oil, gas, coal, and/or other minerals within the boundaries of the Osage Reservation are hereby reserved to the Osage Nation pursuant to the Act of June 28, 1906, (34 Stat. 539), as amended, and is hereby designated the Osage Mineral Estate."
The surface can be bought and sold; the estate underneath it cannot. It is held in trust by the United States and administered for the Nation by the Osage Minerals Council, which the Constitution designates in Article XV, Section 4 as “an independent agency within the Osage Nation established for the sole purpose of continuing its previous duties to administer and develop the Osage Mineral Estate”, with “no legislative authority for the Osage Nation government.” Only Osage mineral royalty interest holders vote in its elections, and it alone holds the power to “consider and approve leases” of the estate.
Two consequences follow, and both matter to anything built in the county. A developer who buys or leases the surface does not acquire the minerals below it. And because the estate is federal trust property, a lease to disturb it runs not only through the Minerals Council but through the United States, whose Department of the Interior “administers the Osage Nation’s mineral rights, which include ownership of rocks and minerals below the ground’s surface.”
What counts as mining
The reach of that ownership was settled against a wind farm. Osage Wind LLC leased 8,400 acres of surface rights and, beginning in 2014, excavated foundation holes for 84 turbines, then sorted and crushed the excavated rock and used it as backfill. It obtained no mineral lease.
In 2017 the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals held that this was mining. In the Tulsa World’s account of the litigation, the appellate court found that Osage Wind’s “extraction, sorting, crushing and use of minerals as part of its excavation work constituted mineral development, thereby requiring a federally approved lease that was not obtained.” The court “disputed the district judge’s interpretation that the definition of mining required the sale of minerals”, and the United States Supreme Court declined to review the decision.
The remedy came in December 2023. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves, sitting by designation in Tulsa federal court, granted the United States and the Nation “ejectment of the wind turbine farm for continuing trespass.” She wrote that “Defendants’ past and continued refusal to obtain a lease constitutes interference with the sovereignty of the Osage Nation and is sufficient to constitute irreparable injury”, and that the monetary cost of removal, which the developer put in the hundreds of millions, “would not negate the public interest in private entities abiding by the law and respecting government sovereignty and the decision of courts.” Osage Minerals Council Chairman Everett Waller called it “a win for Indian Country.”
The rule the case leaves behind is short. Federal law “requires developers to obtain a permit from the tribe’s Minerals Council to engage in any mining activity in the county”, and excavating and reusing rock is mining. Any project that grades a site and moves the rock underneath it is on the ground the estate covers.
Project Spring
In February 2026 Sand Springs approved an 827-acre Google data center, called Project Spring, on the edge of town within the Osage Reservation. The developer, White Rose Partners, met the Minerals Council that month. What the company is asking for names the estate directly: as reported by Osage Public Media Exchange, “Google says it’s looking for a minerals lease to use the underlying rock for earthwork, not oil or gas.”
That request is the difference between this project and the wind farm. Osage Wind excavated first and litigated for a decade; here a developer has come to the Council for a lease to disturb the rock before building. What the facility will do is less settled. Managing partner Jeff Eigenbrood told the Council, “They don’t disclose exactly what they do at each facility”, and the company, asked whether the site would train artificial intelligence, said only that “The proposed data center could be used for a number of applications.” Eigenbrood said the project would “create 1,000 full-time jobs.”
The Council discussed the project in executive session more than once after February and did not decide it in public in the reporting collected here.
The water question
Alongside the rock, the second resource is water, and here the record is one of unanswered questions rather than a settled rule. The company says Project Spring will use air cooling, with water for domestic purposes drawn from an existing six-inch City of Sand Springs line, and Eigenbrood told the Council “There’s expected to be very minimal water usage for cooling purposes” while Google “has asked for flexibility in the future to potentially use water.”
Osage officials have described the material they were given as insufficient to decide on. Geoffrey Standing Bear, the outgoing Principal Chief who was then elected to the Minerals Council, said: “Where is the proof on the water? Where is the proof on all these issues?” He added that the company “provided me some documents, a nice booklet, but it’s not the science we need to make these decisions”, and “I can’t make a decision until I see verifiable information that it’s not just people’s politics getting ahead of the science.” Another incoming Council member, Chuck Tillman, framed the same tension toward negotiation: “I do not want to damage our water rights, but we have to look at it in a smart business decision way.”
Water sits on less certain legal ground for the Nation than the mineral estate does. After the Supreme Court’s decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, Governor Kevin Stitt invoked a 2005 federal provision, authored by Senator Jim Inhofe and known as the Midnight Rider, that lets the state veto a tribe’s request to administer federal environmental programs. As a result the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, not the Nation, currently regulates the water in question, a point Project Spring’s own website notes. The estate below the surface is the Nation’s by a 1906 statute and a federal trust; the water is contested.
What other nations did
The Osage are not deciding this alone or first. In March 2026 the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma became one of the first tribal governments in the country to ban AI data centers on its reservation; a moratorium authored by council member Chebon Kernell passed with all 24 members present in favor. The Muscogee National Council rejected a facility bid in November 2025, and the Cherokee Nation created a study task force in February 2026. Tulsa and Oklahoma City, along with Edmond and Norman, enacted their own moratoriums.
Oklahoma Representative Amanda Clinton, a Cherokee Nation citizen, put the geography plainly: “Half of Oklahoma is Indian Country. So inevitably, if they want to expand in Oklahoma, they’re probably going to be on one of our tribal reservations.” Kernell placed the decision in older terms: “We speak the mother languages of these lands that have been here millennia upon millennia before these technologies existed. We have a right to say how life can be.”
Where this leaves things
The estate is the Nation’s strongest hold on what happens above it. It reaches every acre of the county, it is backed by a federal trust and a court that ordered turbines removed rather than let a developer skip the lease, and a data center that must move rock cannot build without it. The Nation’s leverage over the water, the power draw and the land use is thinner, routed through a state agency the Nation does not control. As of this writing the Minerals Council, seated after the June 2026 election that returned Talee Redcorn and Paul Revard, had not publicly approved or refused a lease for Project Spring in the materials this record collects. What it decides will set the terms on which the ground can be built on.
This page is part of a record compiled by an Osage citizen, independent of the Osage Nation government. Every figure, date and quotation on it can be checked against the document, recording or report it came from.