Blogs on Document Processing & Data Strategy

Processing Oil and Gas Leases in a Land System? Bad Idea

Written by Brad Blood | October 5, 2021

Acquiring oil and gas lease assets?

Your team needs to rapidly make sense of thousands of land records and well files so you can assess a deal’s potential and move fast to acquire acreage.

Even after a deal closes, you’ll need to onboard boxes and boxes of physical records that contain the critical lease and other asset data your land and operations team need today.

Table of Contents:

Why Oil and Gas Leases are a Problem for Land Software

As part of your acquisition due diligence, your team must rapidly understand asset value as well as risks.

All too often, this daunting task begins with physical records. It can take weeks to even assemble the right data for analysis, delaying the A&D process, in which time economics can shift or the competition can move in.

Consider an acquisition involving 2,100 oil and gas leases. That could translate to half a million lease pages – title opinions, memorandums, assignments, pooling clauses, and a host of other provision data elements, shipped to you in hundreds of boxes.

Getting all that data into your oil & gas lease / land management software or production accounting system is like drinking from a fire hose. With so much data, accounting for oil and gas leases is a massive task.

Whether pre-acquisition or post-acquisition, your team needs to extract dozens of valuable elements per lease in order to leverage lease data in daily workflows into a digital oilfield system.

Click on the brochure below for a sample of land data elements that E&Ps are integrating using Grooper. 

Solutions to the Lease Acquisition Paper Problem:

Bulk Document Processing

If you’ve just received hundreds of boxes containing thousands of leases and half a million pages from your landmen, your office document scanner and oil and gas lease / land management software aren’t going to be up to the job of processing so much information.

That’s where a third-party document scanning service can take the load, quite literally off your hands.

A big advantage to such services is the ability to transform even a truckload of physical data into digital assets within days, leveraging high speed digitization and economy of scale. 

Smart Content Classification

Land management software for oil and gas leases is great at keeping your vital land records organized for reporting and analysis.

But they fail when it comes to data extraction, leaving your team to hand key hundreds of data elements from thousands of pages.

You need a solution that recognizes and extracts lease data elements, and loads them into your systems of record.

How to Accelerate Oil and Gas Lease Data Onboarding

What if you could take a truckload of unstructured acquisition data and documents and transform it into structured data ready for analysis in just a few days

That’s what Grooper does.  Grooper is a turnkey document digitization and data extraction solution. that combines data processing services – like pickup and bulk scanning of documents – with category leading intelligent document processing that is capable of recognizing virtually all lease data elements including:

  • API numbers
  • Mother Hubbard clauses
  • Lease provisions such as Pugh clauses
  • Royalty rates
  • Landowner / lessor information
  • Primary term details

Suddenly, accounting for oil and gas leases becomes a very manageable task.

If you are frustrated with the limitations of your land software, Grooper is the most efficient method for importing physical data so your land and legal staff can get to work with the data they need faster than ever.

Grooper automates the acquisition data onboarding process using natural language processing and a deep understanding of oil & gas content.

Grooper - Available as a Product and as a Service

As a service, our team of enterprise content managers will bulk process and backfill oil and gas lease acquisition data into your management software, general ledger, or other systems for reporting and analysis. 

As a product, Grooper becomes a part of your oil and gas lease analysts' workflow, empowering them with tools for scanning and rapidly extracting lease information on an ongoing basis.

For more information about the oil and gas lease data elements that Grooper intelligently recognizes and extracts, check out our Digital Oilfield page:

Oil and Gas Lease FAQs:

What is an oil and gas lease?

An oil and gas lease is a written contract between a mineral owner (described as the 'lessor' in the contract) and an oil and gas exploration company or working interest owner (described as the 'lessee' in the contract) where the lessor gives rights to find, drill, and pump out minerals such as gas or oil for a certain period of time. This period of time is called the 'primary term' in the contract. 

The lessee can operate on the land for as long as the primary term dictates, or as long after the term as minerals are being generated in measurable amounts. The lease contract stipulates that the lessor has a working interest in the minerals produced. Through the lease, the money that the lessor makes off mineral production is called a royalty payment.