(a) Prior to the public auction contemplated in § 182-4 or 182-5, or the granting of mining lease without public auction contemplated in § 182-4 or 182-5, the board shall cause a mining lease for the land in question to be drawn. The lease shall describe the land and shall contain, in addition to such other provisions which the board may deem appropriate, specific provisions as provided in this section.
Terms Used In Hawaii Revised Statutes 182-7
- county: includes the city and county of Honolulu. See Hawaii Revised Statutes 1-22
- Jurisdiction: (1) The legal authority of a court to hear and decide a case. Concurrent jurisdiction exists when two courts have simultaneous responsibility for the same case. (2) The geographic area over which the court has authority to decide cases.
- Lease: A contract transferring the use of property or occupancy of land, space, structures, or equipment in consideration of a payment (e.g., rent). Source: OCC
- Obligation: An order placed, contract awarded, service received, or similar transaction during a given period that will require payments during the same or a future period.
The prices of virgin pig aluminum for the purpose of determining the royalties under this section shall be the basic price on the mainland United States market for virgin pig, not refined, f.o.b. factory. The royalties shall be in lieu of any severance or other similar tax on the extracting, producing, winning, beneficiating, handling, storing, treating, or transporting of the mineral or any product into which it may be processed in the State, and shall not be subject to reopening or renegotiating for and during the first twenty years of the lease term.
If the lessee desires to mine other minerals, the lessee, before mining the minerals, shall notify the board in writing, and the board and the lessee shall negotiate and fix the royalties for the minerals.
Any other law to the contrary notwithstanding, thirty per cent of all royalties received by the State from geothermal resources shall be paid to the county in which mining operations covered under a state geothermal resource mining lease are situated; provided that if the geothermal resources are located on lands under the jurisdiction of the department of Hawaiian home lands, one hundred per cent of royalties received by the State shall be paid to the department of Hawaiian home lands.
(d) The lessee shall covenant and agree that the lessee shall commence mining operations upon the leased lands within three years from the date of execution of the lease; provided that so long as the lessee is actively and on a substantial scale engaged in mining operations on at least one such lease on the same minerals, the covenant shall be suspended as to all other leases held by the lessee.
Any interested party may request that a mining lease contain a research period under which the lessees shall be required to expend money in research and development to establish a method to make economical the mining and processing of the minerals identified in the lease. If the board determines that the research period would be beneficial, it shall fix the period of research and shall also fix a minimum expenditure for labor performed or money spent by the lessee on research and development and the method by which the lessee shall establish that such expenditure in fact be made. In these leases, the obligation to commence mining operations within three years shall not commence until the expiration of the research period.
(e) For the period of the lease the lessee shall have the exclusive right of possession of the minerals leased and the exclusive rights to mine and remove the minerals by means that shall be reasonable and satisfactory to the board and to occupy and use so much of the surface of the land as may reasonably be required, subject to the provisions of section 182-3. The right to use the surface shall include the right to erect transportation facilities thereon, construct plants for beneficiating, drying, and processing the minerals for electric power generation and transmission and other uses as may be approved by the board. The other uses may include but need not be limited to uses necessary or convenient to the processing of the minerals; provided that the lessee shall comply with all water and air pollution control laws, and rules of the State or its political subdivisions.
(f) The lessee may retain all minerals separated from the land as a part of the process of mining the minerals specified in the mining lease; provided that the lease may prescribe the accounting and testing procedures by which the amount and quality of the additional materials shall be determined for the purpose of computing the excise tax thereon and the applicable royalty that may be set by the board for the use of the minerals.
