Finding an attractive and available lease is one of the first steps to drilling a profitable well. E&P companies need to identify open or soon-to-be expiring leases in high grade acreage, determine the actual acreage associated with and ownership of the lease, and then outpace competitors who are following the same steps.

In theory, this should not be too difficult. There are technologies like DI Analytics that flag expiring and inactive leases for you so that you don’t have to sort through individual documents yourself. The lease documents also include the owner and acreage amount, so moving forward with acquiring rights to the field should be easy. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

Complex leasing rules and difficulties obtaining the necessary courtroom filings have combined to make deriving mineral ownership tedious and time-consuming. For example, there can be numerous parties holding mineral interests on a single lease. If each party has their own lease detailing their individual interest, this could result in up to hundreds of duplicate records. Because it’s so difficult to eliminate these duplications, this means the acreage on a lease could be hugely overstated.

Another common issue is when the original lease grantee later assigns the lease to someone else. When lease records are compiled, leases with a third party assigned to them could end up being excluded. This would make it difficult to identify the actual current owner of a lease.

So, what if you’re facing worries that the lease you’re examining doesn’t have accurate data? Are you stuck manually hunting down documents? Luckily, there are easy ways around these problems. DI Analytics removes duplicate leases through spatial mapping of the lease polygons. This results in a single count of acreage for a lease at the grantee level, with links to all the other lease records relating to the acreage. The second problem is solved by assigning leases to operators based on majority well ownership.

Now, the process of identifying the current owner and actual acreage associated with a lease is simple. This infographic covers just a few of the insights you can gather when you’re working with clean leasing data. With better leasing data, you can uncover better intelligence and find better acreage faster and easier than the competition.

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