The Value of Adaptability: Surviving in a Storm Tossed Sea

       A few years ago, I was a volunteer helping to run an oil & gas industry clay shoot.  The participants were landmen and their invited guests.  The guests were a mix of reservoir engineers, geologists, business development specialists, and executives all from oil & gas companies.  My station was close enough to a group of participants that I had no choice but to hear what they were discussing.  They were remarking on the grand prize giveaway which that year was a Henry Arms lever action rifle.  This particular model was the limited-edition Oilman Tribute Edition.  As the group marveled at its engraving a particularly rude and inconsiderate oil executive that was entirely lacking in the basic social graces inserted himself into their conversation and opined, “If you win it, you’ll have to return it.  You’re landmen, not oilmen.”  Any enthusiasm that the group had was abruptly ended.  

       I spent some time thinking about the interaction.  When you got past the gentleman’s boorishness I had to admit, at least as to myself, he had a point.  I trained as, and in a past life worked as an attorney, and I am currently a managing director at a land services company.  I have never drilled an oil & gas well and if they saw me approaching a drilling rig, they would rightly bar me entry for my own protection.  I have never even been accorded the honor of coming up with the code name for a new drilling program.  I am not an oilman.  I guess that had I won the rifle I too would have had to return it.   

       As if the reality of this separation needed to be demonstrated to me further, a little over a decade ago I was visiting a client’s office on the last Friday in December before everyone broke for the holidays. The client was one of the largest oil & gas companies in the world and it had been a particularly good year for oil prices, rig count, and production. I had been asked to travel into their office and provide an end-of-year update on a large project we were working but unbeknownst to me that morning the employees of the company each learned how large their annual incentivized bonus would be for the preceding year. I stepped into an office building filled with some of the happiest people I had seen in years, all of whom were about to leave to attend year-end departmental lunches. Needless to say, I was at best an afterthought. After politely waiting around for over an hour in a conference room on one of their operational floors, I decided it was appropriate for me to leave. I let myself through the protective, magnetically locking glass doors that separate the elevator shafts from the rest of the floor and pushed the call button for the elevator. Unfortunately, I did not have an electronic security pass that would allow me to either initiate the elevator call sequence or re-enter the operational portion of the floor where I could have used a phone to call down to security for assistance. I was so high up in the building that my own cell phone did not receive a signal. For an hour I alternately paced the small space in front of six elevators or sat down and rested against a wall.  Finally, by midafternoon security noticed me and came to retrieve me. There has never been a more stark reminder in my career that I am a service vendor and not a client.

       After some additional thought, I realized that to at least some extent the boorish oilman was right – and that’s alright.  If you work in land acquisition you might be a landman, a land professional, a land developer, a right-of-way agent, or a realtor.  You might work for the landowner, or you might seek to acquire what the landowner has.  You might be an independent, or work for a brokerage, or in-house at a company.  You could work in the oil & gas, renewable, hard mineral extraction, residential or commercial real estate, or one of a dozen other industries or sectors.  But no matter how you approach the field we all share one basic element in common – we bring the project from the conceptual realm into the actual realm.  

       Prior to initiating a land acquisition campaign, a business only has a concept or an idea on a whiteboard.  They have a theoretical pitch made to investors or management, but they don’t yet have a project.  It doesn’t matter the industry; it requires a physical location somewhere on the ground to site a project before you can start whatever production or operations you intend to derive revenue and profit from.  Those who identify, acquire, manage, and maintain land are part of that necessary first step in any project.  That means that until we do our job well the oilman from the story above cannot do his.  That makes what we do as a profession somewhat important – just as important, in some ways, as what the oilman brings to the equation.

       I spent the first fifteen years of my career acquiring land and leases for the oil & gas industry.  I had the opportunity to work with many phenomenal companies and developed relationships that I still maintain, value, and enjoy to this day.  But after a while I started to grow bored with repeating the same process on different projects and for different clients.  I wanted to see to what level my skills and resources were transferrable between industries and sectors.  It was nothing against the oil & gas industry, just a desire to incorporate new challenges into my life and career.  At the start of the new year, I walked into a colleague’s office and told him that I was ready and wanted more.  He countered with a cute joke about me having the jitters about being able to repeat the previous year’s successful numbers again in the current year.

       Jitters, curiosity, and snark aside, a real question was posed; to what degree were a land professional’s skills transferable between different sectors and industries?  If my supposition was correct, that land professionals provided a valuable service to oilmen, renewable developers, and miners but were not themselves engaged in the end-stage activities of each discipline, then the skill transfer rate should be fairly high.  After all, regardless of whether you were an oil & gas landman, a pipeline or transmission right-of-way agent, or a renewable land developer, your daily tasks included researching and utilizing recorded title documents and then negotiating instruments with landowners and rights holders.   To some extent these basic skills formed the basis for the identification, acquisition, and management of the land utilized by each end market. During our initial conversations on the matter my colleague and I estimated that possibly upwards of ninety percent (90%) of a land professional’s skill set would be transferable between industries.

       Over the intervening six years, while continuing to work in the oil and gas, renewable, hard mineral extraction, and infrastructure sectors, we eventually reduced the rate of estimated transferability down to about seventy-five percent (75%).  While the vast majority of a land professional’s skills are indeed transferable between industries and sectors, each Industry or sector does have clearly definable requirements and expectations not shared across competing end markets.  While it is certainly possible for a competent land professional to eventually develop the skill set and expertise necessary to act across multiple industries and sectors, those necessary skill sets will not typically be present and refined at the outset when transferring in a new agent. Oil & gas landmen are highly proficient at understanding and negotiating for mineral rights but quite often either discount or disregard the importance of negotiating with a surface owner. Renewable land developers, by contrast, invest the majority of their time into negotiating with a surface owner for the right to site a project on the surface of their land but are either unfamiliar with or to some extent afraid of interacting with the dominant mineral estate.  Hard mineral miners, for their part, have spent the majority of the preceding decades operating on federal or state land and are now trying to expand their on-shoring operations onto private fee acreage with all the joys and tribulations that typically attach to such an effort.  

     Some would have you believe that there is a wide chasm between a surface or mineral land professional and a right-of-way agent, but in reality, their skill sets are so closely aligned that they are readily transferable between linear and site development projects, albeit with a period for adjustment. In fact, several of the finest managers I work with came from the right-of-way side of the business and now help manage and run complicated site development projects.  

        If you can run mineral title, you can run surface title.  Mineral title agents typically have the luxury of more time to complete their research and analysis, and clients understand that greater cost will be involved.  Agents who research mineral title often run into trouble adapting to the speed with which surface title must be completed as clients have engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of time and cost allowed to complete such tasks.  Surface title is in some ways simpler as its typically only looks back thirty to fifty years (as opposed to back all the way to out sale or sovereignty) and is only concerned with the conveyance and encumbrance of the surface estate.  The surface title agent can often ignore the complex mineral history which greatly reduces the number of instruments they must locate and consider.  It normally takes a little bit longer to successfully transfer a surface title agent to the mineral side than it does to reverse the equation, but both specialties are more than capable of learning and accomplishing each other’s tasks.  Title is title – the instruments filed for public record tell you who owns what, under what conditions, and what restrictions or encumbrances might exist.  It does not matter what end use the land will be used for, the current ownership report will be the same regardless.  Therefore, switching title agents between industries and sectors requires only a minimum of retraining and explanation.

        Negotiations are a function of understanding the human being on the other side of the table.  Some people have this skill, many do not.  The best negotiators are empathetic, sympathetic, knowledgeable, organized, and kind.  Negotiating is a general skill.  If you can negotiate an oil & gas lease, then you can negotiate a surface lease preparatory to a solar farm.  If you can arrange to purchase a landowner’s minerals, then you can negotiate with that mineral owner to waive their rights of ingress and egress to explore for and produce those same minerals.  There will be some new terminology to learn and new forms for familiarize yourself with, but the basic skill is the same.  I have never had an issue rotating a good negotiator between oil & gas, renewable, and hard mineral projects.

        From a management perspective, assisting clients in these situations requires much the same basic skill set.  The task, generally, is to identify, acquire, and manage land and to do so within budget and by a certain set date.  What the client does with that land matters less than the ability to acquire land that falls within set parameters in a timely and cost-effective manner.  Over the past decade, I have been involved with, run, and managed oil & gas leasehold acquisition and drilling programs, solar, wind, and battery storage greenfielding and late-stage development projects, hard mineral bore sampling and extraction efforts, state and county roadway expansions, and carbon sequestration pipeline and site injection projects.  I am always aware of the end market I am currently serving; I will often employ a different approach between the several sectors, and there are certainly linguistic and jargon differences between the sectors, but my basic skill set and proficiencies remain much the same from project to project.

        So where does all of this leave us as a profession?  The industries that we service are sometimes in competition for the same land resources, and we have an ethical obligation to do our utmost to see that our client’s aims and priorities are successfully met.  Many in the profession are directly employed by a sector-aligned company as mentioned in this post, and, for the moment, we can agree that they should be focused on the industry in which they work.  But for all those professionally un-aligned individuals and companies, there is something to be gained by remembering that our skills are transferable and valuable to many different clients requiring land acquisition services for their projects. 

       One of the core beliefs of this blog centers on the notion that as the nation progresses through the next several decades, we will need every molecule of power derived from oil and gas sources and every electron that can be created from renewable sources. Those in the land acquisition profession are in a unique position, able to cross industries and sectors and help achieve the goal of ensuring that energy production from all sources keeps up with the needs of domestic economic growth forecasts over the next few decades. There is very little point, and very little need, to fall victim to an arbitrary and artificial form of tribalism which would only prevent highly qualified individuals from helping achieve that stated aim.