UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

┐ EOG RESOURCES, INC., │ Plaintiff-Appellee, │ > No. 24-3211 │ v. │ │ LUCKY LAND MANAGEMENT, LLC, │ Defendant-Appellant. │ ┘

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio at Columbus. No. 2:23-cv-04232—Edmund A. Sargus Jr., District Judge.

Argued: February 5, 2025

Decided and Filed: April 14, 2025

Before:THAPAR, NALBANDIAN, and DAVIS, Circuit Judges

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COUNSEL ARGUED: Daniel P. Corcoran, THEISEN BROCK, Marietta, Ohio, for Appellant. Christopher J. Baronzzi, PORTER, WRIGHT, MORRIS & ARTHUR LLP, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Daniel P. Corcoran, THEISEN BROCK, Marietta, Ohio, for Appellant. Christopher J. Baronzzi, Robert J. Karl, Kyle C. Gilliam, PORTER, WRIGHT, MORRIS & ARTHUR LLP, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellee.

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OPINION _________________

NALBANDIAN, Circuit Judge. Lucky Land Management owns property in Ohio. EOG Resources has drilling rights to the oil and gas under that property. The two couldn’t agree on whether EOG’s rights to drill included the right to drill from Lucky Land’s surface out to No. 24-3211 EOG Res., Inc. v. Lucky Land Mgmt., LLC Page 2

adjacent properties as well. So EOG sued. EOG then asked the district court to grant a preliminary injunction letting the company access the land to cut down trees and start constructing drills. The district court did so, finding that EOG would probably succeed on the merits.

We disagree. Lucky Land has the better reading of oil-and-gas law; generally speaking, your leased drilling rights don’t let you use the land’s surface to drill into neighboring lands, too. What’s more, EOG wouldn’t have suffered any irreparable injury if it had to wait while the litigation progressed. And preliminary injunctions aren’t shortcuts to the merits—by preventing irreparable injuries, they simply preserve the court’s ability to issue meaningful final relief at the end of the case. So they aren’t appropriate when there’s no prospect of irreparable harm.

Because neither the merits nor the equitable considerations favored EOG, we reverse.

I.

Brian Lucky runs Lucky Land Management, which buys, develops, and flips real estate. In 2022, Lucky Land bought a 313-acre rural property in Ohio for $720,000. Brian worked to develop it into a deer hunting site, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build access roads through the land, construct an entrance gate, dam springs to create watering holes, plant special grasses, cut hunting trails, and develop food plots (cleared, planted areas meant to attract deer). He intended the food plots to be the property’s main attraction and a primary selling point for potential purchasers. He invested around $300,000 just to clear and develop the plots. Between the purchase price and the development costs, he put well over a million dollars into the land.

Title to the oil and gas below the property was severed from the rest of the e