I am John Toppa. I run a land and title company out of Melbourne, Florida, and once a month I fly to Fort Worth to read paperwork. That is the job, stated plainly, and it is more interesting than it sounds.
Data is what everybody talks about these days. The Texas Railroad Commission website is a valiant attempt at retrofitting an oil and gas database composed of regulatory filings going back more than a hundred years. Mining that data for a particular use is a task too reliant on industry knowledge to assign to a tech contractor, and too overwhelming for a typical petroleum landman. It sits in the gap between the two, which is where I work.
I go through thousands of documents. Recorded legal instruments, seemingly inane regulatory filings, and sometimes obscure property tax statements that turn out to matter more than anything else in the stack. Pattern recognition is the essential skill. Reconstructing a well history against a hundred years of changing regulations and lease provisions can feel like a fool's errand on a bad afternoon, and the difference between a fool's errand and a finding is usually whether I recognized the right pattern early enough to follow it.
On any given day I have twenty tabs open across three screens. Every tab is a puzzle piece from a picture I have not seen yet. The reward can be tremendous. The risk is being swamped by useless datapoints until the reward stays out of reach, and that risk is real, because most of what you find is noise. It takes just as much time scouring for the right data as it does searching for technology that can organize and store it once you have it. Guided software that helps me recognize the correct patterns has become crucial to any success I have had here.
None of this is settled. The records are a century deep, the tools are two years old, and the rules change under both. Which is the whole appeal, if I am honest. A landman should always be synonymous with student.
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