First-Ever Land Super CAB tackles Oil and Gas Land Management Industry Issues

From cross-border land management issues to acreage analytics, the members of the first annual Land Super CAB meeting came together in late November and had an active discussion around land management issues in the oil and gas industry.

The Land Super CAB is comprised of senior land managers of oil and gas companies of all sizes.

The Land Super CAB is an industry first. It is comprised of senior land managers of oil and gas companies of all sizes, super majors to independents. The Super CAB is based on the CAB, or Client Advisory Board model, that P2 uses across all of its software and data products. Because P2 has the largest and broadest suite of land management solutions in upstream oil and gas, it was only logical that we spearhead an effort to talk about issues, problems and challenges around managing land and lease assets in oil and gas.

Almost 70 members of the Land Super CAB gathered at ASCEND 2011, P2’s annual user conference in San Antonio for the meeting. Land product management director Christina Saldivia began the meeting with a demonstration of a new way to scan and extract information from paper lease contracts. Blaine Owens and Adam Stoops from Brainware gave a demo of how their software intelligently scans information and grabs what’s needed by analyzing the context of the content. The distiller, as they call it, classifies the document (is it a lease? A contract? A well permit?), extracts the information based on what the document is, validates the data, then sends it to the land management software for review by a human being.

Next up was a panel discussion featuring six land managers from P2 clients, including two super majors. The first topic was North American cross-border land challenges. Two people on the panel were facing that challenge, while several in the audience also struggled with it. The biggest challenge seemed to be that there is currently no software solution that is equipped to handle land in both Canada and the US. That means companies are using two products, two processes and two support systems.

Most representatives from publically traded companies said that it was very difficult to come up with an accurate acreage report at the end of the year for 10k reporting purposes.

Reporting is also an issue for cross-border companies. If a Canadian company has US lands, it’s difficult to use Canadian land software to make SOX-compliant reports.

Acreage analytics are also an ongoing issue. Most representatives from publicly traded companies said that it was very difficult to come up with an accurate acreage report at the end of the year for 10k reporting purposes. Usually upper management ends up questioning the figures, and there’s a mad rush to explain what happened to all those acres.

One large E&P combats this by running a full set of 10-K reports once a month to compare to the previous months. Any major changes in acreage prompts questions that they then track down and reconcile. It only takes an hour a month to look at the reports, and maybe another hour to make phone calls and research the differences.

The next topic was how everyone was handling land from acquisitions. From the discussion, it was clear that taking on a new set of land assets is similar to a trip to the dentist for an endless root canal. Cleanup of data seems to be the biggest challenge here. All companies have their own way of maintaining data which means that every conversion requires data cleanup in order to match the integrity and consistency of your current data. One company reported that sometimes the clean up efforts can easily last a year or more.

This was the first Land Super CAB meeting; we are planning annual gatherings. We see the Land Super CAB as a way to bring more than 500 land management clients together to help everyone meet the challenges of land management as well as help design technology for the future of land management.

For questions about the Land Management Super CAB, you can contact Christina Saldivia at csaldivia@p2energysolutions.com.