Title work

Title work is the process of researching public records — deeds, probates, prior leases, and agreements — to establish who legally owns the mineral rights under a given tract of land, and what rights and duties each owner holds. It's often described as the foundation the entire industry sits on, because nothing downstream, from leasing to drilling to paying royalties, works if ownership isn't understood correctly first.

The process gets harder the longer an area has produced: ownership fragments across generations through inheritance, sales, and litigation, so a single well can involve dozens of different tracts each with their own tangled ownership history. As horizontal wells span longer laterals across more tracts, that title complexity only grows, making thorough title work more valuable, not less, as fields mature.