[sokoloff]

This plus many people own mineral rights that are impractical or likely non-economical to exercise if you have to actually do the work to get the resource out of the ground. If you take that obligation to zero, many more properties' mineral rights are valuable (which goes to the exploitable financial incentive scheme point you made).

I own the mineral rights to a plot that also has a house on it. It would suck for the house usage to drill for oil on that land and there might not be economically viable oil underneath (you only ever know statistically/via modeling until you drill)...