#356 - Larry Brogdon - Partner @ Four Sevens Oil Company - Tales From The Barnett Shale

Chris Powers: Larry, welcome to the show today. 

Larry Brogdon: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. 

Chris Powers: Let's go to North; we'd call it North of Fort Worth. 

Larry Brogdon: Yes. 

Chris Powers: George Mitchell had entered the game. Where were you at in your career and starting to observe that unfolding? 

Larry Brogdon: Well, George Mitchell was looking for new production.

And so, because their gas reserves were going down and down and down for production. 

Chris Powers: And this was all up where? 

Larry Brogdon: This is all in the Fort Worth Basin. 

Chris Powers: Okay. 

Larry Brogdon: They had about half a million barrels in multiple counties. I mean, half a million acres held by production. 

Chris Powers: And what year is this?

Larry Brogdon: He started in the fifties but didn't do his first Barnett well until 1981. And he had a great team: Dan Stewart, Nick Steinsberger, Kit Valker, and Black Shales guy. And so they were trying to get it. They knew there was gas in the Barnett, but it was a tight rock, and the economics could have been better.

But he had to keep more and more gas going through the pipeline because he got all that gas going to Chicago. He had to keep X gas through the pipeline for an excellent price. They got a better price than we did because he had this pipeline connection.

That started in 81, and he drilled 350 vertical wells or something like that. They were all marginal. They could have been better. I was watching it, and the thing about the Barnett Shale is that it is so unique; it's an organic, rich rock, and it is loaded with gas. It's just really tight.

People have tried to perforate it and make it work. It didn't. Things changed. At the time, they were doing frack jobs that used gel, which was very expensive and used a lot of chemicals. The service companies loved selling, and they were making a ton of money. But Nick Steinberger had come up with this idea.

They were doing the slick water fracks in the Cotton Valley in East Texas. He took one of the wells, the number one slay, that had already been perforated and fracked it in the Barnett with a gel frack. He refracted it using slick water, suddenly making a nonproductive well into a good one.

That kicked it off right there, but at the same time, the natural gas price was increasing. So, the slick water fracts were much cheaper than the jail facts. Those were very expensive. It was a lot cheaper, about half the cost. And so when you have a price going up, and you've got completion costs, it's half, it makes the changes, all the economics.

And so the Barnett covers such a big area, 17 or 19 counties, something like that. And now there's even a play out in West Texas in the Barnett. Okay. Way out West. And so, but at that time, it would seem to me. At the time, it was a perfect situation where you had a place where you couldn't ever miss the target.

It's everywhere. Every time you drill a well, it's going to be there. How can you make it economically and make money from this deal? And so most of the vertical wells were okay, but they weren't. So things changed when George Mitchell sold out to Devon. 

Chris Powers: What year was that? 

Larry Brogdon: And that was in 2001 or 2002.

Chris Powers: And so just quick. 1981, he realized we needed to make more oil on this property. Gas, gas, we need more gas. So he tries over 300 times to do some vertical frack, with over 300 wells, to test, test, and test it. Nick comes in, and 99 ish with slick water frack, slick water frack, and light bulbs suddenly go off.

So George probably continued that process for a few years, and then Devin came to the table in 2001, too, bought and said, we'll buy you out. 

Larry Brogdon: Takes them out. And so they, in 2020, no, excuse me, 2001. Let me back up a little bit.

Chris Powers: We'll keep going back and forth.

Larry Brogdon: Yeah. It is a back-and-forth story because, at that time, we were still drilling vertical wells. And were you with Dick and Hunter yet? At this time, I had been doing consulting work for them, and I was drilling wells in Jack County and places like that. Yeah. For them. And I was not an employee.

I was more of a consultant, but I got them interested in the Barnett because it looked like we were standing on the best thing in the world. We didn't know how to get the gas out then, so we had the Barnett Shale symposium anyway.

A tornado came through Fort Worth in March 2000, and all the oil companies, Union Pacific, were moving out of Fort Worth. Then, all of a sudden, we got this tornado. We had an oil library, and I was chairman of the board of that library at that time.

They were in the Malik tower and got hit. We wondered how to keep the doors open and suggested a Barnett Shale symposium. We sat around and agreed that we wanted to do it. Some didn't want to do it, but we had the Barnett Shell symposium in the old petroleum club, whether the old ones were still there, the petroleum club in 2000.

We thought we wanted to have 35 or 40 people there, and we came to find out we had such a big crowd. The fire marshals shut it down. It wouldn't allow anybody else in. We had companies like Texaco, Shell, and Exxon there. And I was MC and the thing, and I couldn't get George to allow anybody to talk from his company about it.

So I was getting in people from the government, and people who had done slick water fracks and all this kind of stuff to talk. And that launched; many people would make them take a different look at what was going on in the Barnett channel. Okay. And so I made it at that time; Hunter and Dick were interested in me becoming a partner with them.

So we went to the Fort Worth club and made a deal. With Hunter up there, it seemed like some elaborate, long legal contract. It wasn't. It was just an eight-and-a-half by 11 sheet of paper. We wrote the deal down and never looked at it again. And they were great partners—I mean, superpartners.

I've learned a lot from them. They were like mentors to me to hundreds, like my big brother. And so that launched things in the Barnett. 

Chris Powers: So you partnered with them, and George had made some public comments like, this is only going to work up north. What happened?

Larry Brogdon: So what happened was in the vertical wells. They thought that there was an area in the south. East Wise County, Southwest, Denton County, and the top part of Tarrant County. That was the only thing that would be good because you needed to have thought at that time; you had to have a barrier above the Barnett Shale, the Marble Falls, and one below it called the Viola, which was solid hard rock.

To confine the frack jobs to the Barnett. And if you didn't have that, The frack would go up. It would go down, and all you'll get is water. You're not going to frack the Barnett. And so that was their thought. And they were trying to confine it to this all the time.

They're going beyond that barrier and buying leases, so we started buying leases along with them. But anyway, this set off that symposium and lit a fire under many people. 

Chris Powers: Okay. So let's go back to 2002. So George Mitchell sells to Devon. And then you said the game changed again.

What happened? 

Larry Brogdon: Okay. Horizontal wells. And they had permitted seven wells. Four were in the happy hunting grounds area, where you had the barriers above and below, and three were outside. Okay. And so they made excellent wells on those in the sweet spot.

And that's the one we were interested in, the ones outside. And a well around Boyd in Southern Wise County was beyond the barriers. And that's the one where, on a Sunday, I'd taken my family to church. Is this the number two Harrison? The number two is Harrison. And I was so excited about that.

Well, it had rained that day. I dropped my family off, kept my Sunday church clothes on, and couldn't stand it. I had to get out there. It's raining. Finally, I got out on location. I knew I would have to jump the fence, but the gate was open. So I went in there. And that, well, they had all of the valves off.

I mean, they had all of the meters shut down. They had all the gauges shut down. They didn't want anybody to see the pressures, and they didn't want to see how much gas it was making. So they shut all that off, but I could hear it, and it was singing, and I'd heard enough wells. I knew that was a great well, and that's when the world changed as far as I was concerned.

Because now we could go beyond these barriers, and the Barnett could, so much of Johnson County, Tarrant County, and Wise County did not have these barriers. And that's when things started to blow up because there was one well. The Boyd well was excellent.

There was another one down by Cleaver. That was good. Well, then there was one—either in Parker County or Hood. I can't remember. And it was not a good well. So you made good wells. Six of them out of seven drilled wells were beyond the barriers.

Chris Powers: So, from a geology standpoint, why did those wells? Why were they so good if they didn't have the limestone on top and bottom? 

Larry Brogdon: Well, because when you're drilling a horizontal well. You're drilling where we're sitting right now. Barnett's about 350 feet thick. Okay. If you can drill a horizontal well if you can drill a horizontal 

Chris Powers: It’s about a football field thick.

Larry Brogdon: Yeah. Okay. And, like some of the buildings downtown. But when you're drilling a horizontal well. You have to make a curve, but you can drill one mile out, two miles out. Suddenly, you're exposed to 10,000 feet instead of 350 feet. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to frack as close to that well-bore as you can because there's so much gas there. Yep. And so you don't get this frack going up and down. Now they do frack jobs that are 30 stages. We did one or two stages back then, and the technology was just really advanced. Remarkably. 

Chris Powers: Okay. So your folks get dropped off. You go to Harrison number two on your Sunday best; the world changed that day.

That's correct. What did you do in the next 24 hours or the next week? You probably called Dick and Hunter and said, we got something. 

Larry Brogdon: Oh, yeah. I mean, we knew immediately. We believed it would be good before, but that was proof. Right. Okay. 

Chris Powers: Okay. The proof's now out.

Larry Brogdon: The proof's now out. Yeah. The horizontal is the way to go. Okay. Then what did you do? Well, then, you've got to change the fleet of your rigs because you have rigs that are only driven and drill 7,000 feet. Now you need some that are going to go to 15,000 feet. Okay. So it takes a while. You got to change out these rigs.

That change happened. Although we did some horizontal wells with rigs, we had no business drilling horizontal wells. It was quite a significant technology change because you had to steer these wells in certain zones that you thought were best in the barnet.

Chris Powers: Then, did you partner with Sinclair? 

Larry Brogdon: We partnered with Sinclair. Yeah.

Chris Powers: So, what year are you? I'm following a timeline, but did you partner with Sinclair before you knew about Devon well, or did that come afterward? 

Larry Brogdon: That was about the same time. 

Chris Powers: And you told Sinclair.

Larry Brogdon: Well, Sinclair came to us.

Chris Powers: Okay. 

Larry Brogdon: Marty Searcy. 

Chris Powers: Shout out to Marty. 

Larry Brogdon: Shout out to Marty. It was a good friend of Ross Matthews, who was part of Sinclair. And now he's running it. He was also the ex-Union Pacific guy like Marty was. And he's the one that got us together with them. And they had a nice balance sheet.

We knew the prices would go up dramatically, and they did. So, they were a perfect partner for us—very supportive. So, because suddenly, the acreage cost was starting to go up—I know it jumped from about 500 an acre at one time to 3,000 immediately—to compete, we had to have a partner like Sinclair.

Chris Powers: What were the marching orders Once the partnership was made?

Larry Brogdon: The marching orders, get out there and start drilling wells. Now we only used two, or we only had 10 guys, people at the max, in our office. We had 150 landmen out getting leases for us. But in the office, at the maximum amount, there were 10, and four of those were for the farters, so it was a little bitty outfit, 

Chris Powers: but you told the land to go up and start leasing.

Larry Brogdon: Start leasing. Oh yeah. 

Chris Powers: Here's the box. 

Larry Brogdon: Here's yes. 

Chris Powers: And was Hazlitt that? 

Larry Brogdon: Well, it was part of Haslett, and then later on, there were a lot more people at it, especially when we went down to the south part of Tarrant County and the upper part of Johnson County.

We just had a lot of people out there, and you need a lot of people when you've got small leases. At one time, we had up to 16,000 leases. 

Chris Powers: Did the city of Fort Worth adjust quickly to what was going on? 

Larry Brogdon: Well, Mike Moncrief was the mayor at that time. And he had put together certain groups.

And because they had to have an ordinance at the time. There was nowhere else drilled in Fort Worth. There were no pipelines in Tarrant County. And so most of the people, a lot of the people, whenever they'd buy a house, they own the minerals and didn't know it because there was no production.

That was helpful. And getting leases that so many of the people on their minerals and, but the city, there's 30, about 35 or 37 little towns in Tarrant County. There's a whole bunch of them, and each has to have an ordinance. So, much time was spent in city council meetings trying to get ordinances for those little entities.

Yeah. Okay. So there was a lot of political stuff in this, and many people pushed them back, but we were leasing under churches, schools, highways, drilling Pipelines underneath eight 20 and all that stuff. I mean, fantastic stuff drilled wells under All Saints High School.

Chris Powers: Or shady colonial.

Larry Brogdon: Yeah, just all over this place. There have been almost 19,000 wells drilled in the Barnett here. Now, looking around the city, you would never think that. Okay. But there's been tremendous; all the lakes have been drilled under it, and it's incredible what kind of revenue it generated.

Chris Powers: And there have been many resources for so long. 

Larry Brogdon: Yeah, still a lot of resources there. The only problem is the culture; many people are moving here. And there's so much construction going on. It's more complicated to operate in an area like this. 

Chris Powers: The most crucial back then was getting the leases, but you all had to figure out the ordinances, mainly around getting drill sites in the middle of the city.

Larry Brogdon: Yeah. Again, what are the rules going to be? Another problem was noise. And so you'll look around a lot of these healthy sites, it'll have big pads around, the big huge pads because it was loud and when you're fracking wells, and you're drilling and stuff like that, and, you're correct by houses.

One group member went to California, where they were making movies and building sets. And Larry Dale was the guy's name. He went out and did this and convinced some of those people that there's a business model here for sound. Did it's her sound because, you know, when you're a lot of what they would be doing there in Hollywood is they'd be making a movie over here, and they would be building a set over here, and they'd had to have silence between them?

And so they brought that technology here, and you'll see it all over the country now, including Colorado. They're those big, tall mats. And I used to take students out there on field trips. Yeah. Get on one side of the mat when they're, they've got a frack job going on, and you get on the other side of the map, and you can hardly hear it.

Chris Powers: Okay. So, in 2004, did you make your first sale? 

Larry Brogdon: We agreed on a sale. Didn't get close until 2005. 

Chris Powers: Okay. Yeah. And that was XTO

Larry Brogdon: XTO. 

Chris Powers: And that was up in the Hazlitt area. 

Larry Brogdon: That was in the Hazlitt area. 

Chris Powers: And then round number two down in South Fort Worth. 

Larry Brogdon: South Fort Worth. 

Chris Powers: And what brought you down there? 

Larry Brogdon: We got word that a pipeline that used to be a gasoline pipeline was going to run along I-35.

Chris Powers: Yeah. 

Larry Brogdon: We got word that somebody was buying that, and they would convert it to a natural gas pipeline. So we started buying along that. And in that area. So we went down there to Southern Tarrant and Northern Johnson County and started buying leases and putting together about 35-36,000 acres.

So we started drilling in our way. We would drill wells far apart, and then we'd bring pipelines to each of those wells so that there'd be lots of acreage in between where somebody could go in and fill it because we were going to exit.

We wanted to put it in a nice little box with Christmas decorations and then give it to somebody who could develop it. To do that kind of development, you've got to have a lot of people, and we needed more people. We also knew they were starting to do things up in other areas, like the Marcellus, and they were finding gas in Arkansas and other places.

And sooner or later, the gas price would crash, which did happen. 

Chris Powers: How tight was that window? So when did you start South Fort Worth into sales? Are we talking about two or three years? 

Larry Brogdon: Oh, no. We were off. We could have been off for about another month, and then we jumped down there.

Chris Powers: Oh yeah. And did it. Well, no, but from when you took your first lease in South Fort Worth to when you exited, how long was that period? Two or three years? 

Larry Brogdon: Yes. Well, we exited, let me see. We closed the deal with Chesapeake. 

Chris Powers: Yeah. Well, you said you put a Christmas thing together. So Aubrey, AKA Santa Claus, came to town.

Larry Brogdon: That's right. They did. Aubrey McClendon. 

Chris Powers: And that was interesting. 

Larry Brogdon: Yeah. And they had to have it. We also had Production along the Trinity River going east. And we had acreage there. And so we were always afraid of prices. It was getting high. And so anyway, we were able to make a sale in 2007.

Then we started again. Okay, we were in North Tarrant County and now in South Tarrant County in Johnson. We then jumped into the middle of town around TCU and Colonial and all of that area, put together about 9,000 acres plus or minus, and sold it again to Chesapeake without drilling a while this time.

Those were good hits. 

Chris Powers: Then your fourth was in Parker with Denberry. 

Larry Brogdon: Yes, we had. We put together a prominent acreage position in Parker. And, but we weren't the operators. We turned that to Denberry. At first, they were drilling vertical wells. And they weren't. We had a carry for 10 wells, and they drilled 10 wells, which could have been better.

Now, we were supposed to be paid more our way. So, we wanted them to drill horizontal wells. So we made a trade, backed down our interest, and had five well tranches. When those five well tranches came in and paid for themselves, we would back in for our interest.

We eventually sold that to Intervest. So did Denbury. Denbury sold out to them, and then we could sell out to them on the same terms. 

Chris Powers: Were you nervous? 

Larry Brogdon: Yes. Yes. Especially the first one and the second one. The first one, I mean when you this was the first chance to make real money. And so. It was going to be great for my family. My wife had always stuck with me, even the ups and downs, and was great about it.  It was just a relief, and I was tired also because I was doing a lot of work and afraid it wouldn't close. It's going to take a lot of work.

You've made the deal, but these things sometimes take five or six months to close. So, yeah, it was a nervous time. 

Chris Powers: Do you remember what you did the day you closed? 

Larry Brogdon: It was just heavenly. It was perfect. But at the same time, I didn't know the tax consequences. I found that out, too.

Chris Powers: Real quick. Let's take a sidebar. So we've talked about the Barnett. We've talked about what was a miracle. Did you think at any point that it ended abruptly? I got to imagine that after that fourth sale of you all, there were 10 years where nothing happened.

Larry Brogdon: Many of those people and companies came to Chesapeake, as did many others who came in there. You lost their shirt because the price crashed when we sold out. You know, it was $8 or $9 in MCF, but today it's $1.70 or something, and it took a crash. And we were lucky to get out when we did.

Others were lucky to get out when they did. We saw it coming. We knew much gas was coming from Marcellus and other plays, so we were anxious to sell what we did. 

Chris Powers: So you all, you got to witness a modern-day miracle when you saw the number two, Harrison; we were talking earlier, producing all this natural gas out of the Haynesville, out of the Marcellus, out of the Barnett.

And then I asked you earlier, what keeps you up at night? You just said the biggest threat to the U.S. is our grid going down. 

Larry Brogdon: That is correct. 

Chris Powers: From your perspective, just for somebody listening is like. What role does natural gas play in the world? It's been beaten down like this evil thing.

Larry Brogdon: Well, first of all, it feeds the world. 

Chris Powers: Yeah. What do you mean? 

Larry Brogdon: Well, you make ammonia. Natural gas is the cheapest way to make ammonia. But ammonia is used to make fertilizer, which feeds the world. It would be best to have a lot of fertilizer when you've got 8 billion people worldwide, and you go into 10.

Okay, now you can do it with renewables, but it's way more expensive. Four or five times more expensive to do it with that. And you're mixing the hydrogen with nitrogen to make ammonia. So you knock that out. Okay. What are you going to do? Starve most of the people.

When we build all these data centers and go to EDS, you will need twice the grid we've got now. Will we be able to do that by 2050? I don't think so. People have yet to learn of all the other products that are made from oil and gas. 

Chris Powers: So, like, when you turn on your light in the morning, is there something behind all that?

Larry Brogdon: Yeah, a little bit. Many people think that gas, I mean electricity, comes from that plug in the wall, but they don't know what's behind that. Right. And a lot is going on.

Chris Powers: So if natural gas was choked out, or they stopped producing as much of it, The government got radical. The grade goes down. Then what? 

Larry Brogdon: You're done. That's what it is. You're done. And it's hazardous. The path that we're taking right now. 

Chris Powers: How do we excite young people about the energy and change? 

Larry Brogdon: Here's the thing: There are a lot of young people who want to avoid getting in there.

And there's never been a better opportunity right now to get into the oil and gas business and any energy business. And what we're suffering from right now is a need for more talent. The average geologist is 55 or 60 years old. Okay. You're going to lose them. And we don't have that next generation coming in the same way with petroleum engineers. And you know, we're just suffering from talent. And. We need them. We need them back. And the thing is, is for them to, the people need to realize that we're not just drawing the planet and that you're doing good things when you're feeding the world, and everybody likes to drive on tires.

Well, 60 percent of that tire is petroleum. You like to drive on asphalt roads. Thousands of products that would be eliminated come from oil and gas. I mean, you don't get it. You don't get these products in winter. And there's so much; you're using a lot of fossil fuels to build those winters.

Chris Powers: Well, and they're producing it in other areas of the world. We could produce it in America, where it's clean and safe. 

Larry Brogdon: It’s not as if the CO2 rises over Fort Worth or America when China builds a new Gulf. A coal plant every week ties up all these coal reserves.

What do you think they're going to do? What do you think India is going to do? They've got the fifth-largest coal reserves in the world. They’re going to use it. 

Chris Powers: So you're telling me when California tells its citizens not to turn on their gas stoves? That's not counteracting the coal plant being built weekly in China.

Larry Brogdon: That's right. You ask most people what the makeup of the atmosphere is. What would you think the atmosphere is and make up? How much is nitrogen? How much is oxygen? How much of it is CO2? And the answer is 78 percent of it is nitrogen. Twenty-one percent is oxygen, and 0. 41% Is CO2. It's a bit.

Now, I'm not saying we don't contribute to climate change. We do impact it, but we're not all of it. We've been coming out of an ice age for 13,000 years. Okay. And so we're still coming out of it. We're contributing to it, but humans can adapt. I recommend the book How the World Works by Vaclav Smil.

I mean, he talks in there about this 58,000. Merchant ships on the ocean at any one time will not use batteries. Yeah, okay. That's how we get all of our stuff: by trade.

Chris Powers: Well, when we talk about developing countries, the most incredible thing America has is cheap, renewable, or cheap, affordable energy.

No question about it. But if you go to other areas of the world, they won't go from nothing to Teslas. 

Larry Brogdon: In the 1970s, gas increased to $4. 25. That's in 1970s dollars today. What is it? A dollar 72. Unbelievable people in the United States don't realize how lucky they are. For manufacturing, when Europe is paying four or five times higher, they can't even compete.

That's why they're losing their manufacturing. 

Chris Powers: All right. So you were in the oil and gas business. You still are. The Barnett was one of the most prolific stories, and the gold rush was the Barnett. Now, you're spending this part of your career investing in technology that services the oil and gas industry.

What kind of thought surrounds that? 

Larry Brogdon: Yeah, in 2016, I met Ryan Vinson at the Fort Worth club, and we became friends; he had started a technology company called Mineralware, and they needed a little capital. And he had a little bitty office in the oil and gas building. And I think one employee, Heinzelman,

And so we went over and looked at it. My daughter and I, Skylar, are now working in our family office and doing a great job. We wanted to sell a little bitty interest, a little bitty equity interest, to get a little money. And so we did that, putting our finger in the door and our foot in the water.

Then, I went with Ryan and Ben to one or two client shows and saw how they responded. We learned more about the technology. And I thought, man, this thing is going to go. So we returned to Ryan and said, look, you don't want to be undercapitalized.

We want to put X amount of dollars into this company, but we want X amount of equity. We haggled around quite a bit, but we got it done. We started Mineralware, or he had already started Mineralware, but this gave them some support they needed. And we've been partners ever since. We're low maintenance when something needs to get done.

We have a conversation about it; it gets done. And so that was a successful business for us. We were in the Fort Worth club, which was for managing minerals. We got it to a certain point, and we also learned from our clients that they wanted other products to try and trade mineral interests.

Okay. And so. That's where the idea for the energy domain came in. Okay. And we were gathering a tremendous amount of data. And so the energy domain was a marketplace, but I'm getting ahead of myself. We sold out mineralware to SS&C and, I think, a 2022 more prominent company. We wanted to concentrate on the energy domain and another company called Energy Freelance, for which we have changed the name lately.

Tell energy higher. Anyway, these technologies are just efficiency tools. We put up the money to build a platform to get it started and kicked off. And then, what is? It will work, so we raise more capital to build business development teams and things like that.

So yeah, right now, we have three of them going, or no, excuse me. We sold one, and we've got two energy domains, of which Ben Heinzelman is now the CEO and energy freelancer. Energy has hired since we changed the name, and Mike McComb, who used to work for Parsley, is running that down in Austin.

Energy hires use AI. Many companies spend a tremendous amount of money on hiring and using AI. We could make better matches. We're still in the beta phase of that. We had the idea a long time ago, but when we went forward with the energy domain, we found out we needed to have a broker's dealer's license, and it was during the pandemic.

Okay. It took a year and a half to get that, so it set it back. We were going to launch it earlier. It's a good thing we didn't because we could have made it a better product. And when I say we, I mean, Hey, okay. That thing's taken off now, and we're about to launch the energy domain or data product Blast. 

So, yeah, this is going to be good. It will launch us, but we're growing. It started with trading minerals, then went to non, and now it's in ops. Okay. And we'll get to it pretty soon. We've got a guy out of Denver, Chris Robinson, who may take over, for I get it. I'm getting ahead of myself, but for Ben Heisman, so Ben can concentrate on the data side. Yup. So, anyway, those are going well. 

Chris Powers: All right. Well, if you had to make a prediction, for the next 10 years, you think we'll continue to see, you got to see the first revolutionary, maybe not the first, but you got to see fracking and horizontal fracking and got to see that, how that changed the world.

Larry Brogdon: Yes. So much.

Chris Powers: If you were a betting man, would that happen again? Maybe not in the next 10 years, but we'll continue to find ways to extract more oil in the future. 

Larry Brogdon: Oh yeah, no doubt about the technologies getting increasingly efficient all the time. And they have drilling rigs now that can drill without a human being on location, and that's probably coming.

It's hard to believe, but yeah. And there's so much more left anywhere. A shale is the source rock, right? Okay. Then you have reservoir rock. So wherever you have production, it's being sourced from something. You will find that the source is usually shale. Sometimes it's limestone. You know, there's a lot of hydrocarbons there.

I mean, we haven't touched it. Okay, we haven't touched it. And if you look at a map of the world, we're oil and gas fields, you, Most of them or not in shales. This miracle has happened in the United States. It's not happening in Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia; it happens here.

Okay. And the reason we've been so successful is because of private ownership of minerals. 

Chris Powers: Why? 

Larry Brogdon: Because there's a lot more competition for acreage. If you have 20 companies, 30 in Barnett, Hainesville, or Marcellus, they continually improve technology.

You have Exxon over here, which has 5 million acres, and only one company exists. These improvements sometimes come from something other than excellent engineering. Sometimes, they come from trial and error, and things advanced here quickly. And it's fantastic. It's just been a miracle, and it's imposing. And it's going to get better. It will get better if they let us get it better. Okay. 

Chris Powers: Yeah. Do you think they will? 

Larry Brogdon: Yes. And the reason they will is because people can't stand to live without it. Yeah. That's what I think. That's what our family's betting on. Yeah. People cannot stand to live without it. Yeah, and so all I have to do is have a week or two without no. Great. They'll find out real quick. 

Chris Powers: Okay. Like oil and gas. 

Larry Brogdon: That's right. 

Chris Powers: Larry, thank you very much for joining me today. 

Larry Brogdon: Thank you. 

Chris Powers: This was a pleasure.