Carter Collum used to spend the mornings shoulder to shoulder with competitors in the disc rooms of East Texas courts, looking for owners of underground natural gas fields. At night, he made domestic calls, offering payments and royalties to get permission to practice.
Collum worked as a land man, tracking oil and gas owners trapped in layers of rock thousands of feet below the earth’s surface and getting his signatures, a job as old as the American oil industry.
It began around 2006, a couple of years before the shale boom took off and raised drilling rights prices in East Texas to more than $ 15,000 per hectare from $ 250. Successful landlords, who competed to knock on doors ahead of rivals, earned six-figure incomes.
“It was a bit like the wild west,” said Collum, 39. His predecessors in the field included former President George W. Bush and Aubrey McClendon, the pioneer of late fracking who co-founded Chesapeake Energy Corp.
These days, jobs are drying up. Landowners, after surpassing the boom highs, face weakened demand for fossil fuels and investor indifference towards slate companies after years of poor yields. Instead of oil and gas fields, some landowners secure wind and solar fields, points where the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest.