Land management takes a larger role in E&P strategy

In an industry fixated on molecules and margins, land is making a real return to center stage.

With U.S. shale maturing  and inventory tightening, the competitive frontier for exploration and production (E&P) companies is shifting. It’s no longer just about who drills the fastest or fracks the deepest—it’s about who controls the right ground. With premium acreage increasingly scarce and expensive, land positioning and portfolio management are becoming strategic imperatives. Companies with strong land capabilities are outmaneuvering peers not only in acquisition but in execution—and increasingly, in investor returns.

Take Ring Energy. While the industry’s spotlight remains trained on the Permian’s marquee basins—the Midland and Delaware—Ring has been steadily consolidating acreage in the relatively overlooked Central Basin Platform (CBP). In February, it completed a $100 million acquisition from Lime Rock Resources, expanding its footprint by 17,700 net acres and boosting production by 12%. CEO Paul McKinney doesn’t just want to operate in the CBP. He wants to dominate it. “We know these areas very, very well,” McKinney told Water Tower Research last week, adding that Ring’s edge lies in adapting big-basin technology to more conventional plays—territory many rivals have ignored or undervalued.

This is more than opportunism. It’s land strategy.

McKinney’s comments hint at a broader truth: the nature of inventory management is changing. The days of easy-to-acquire tier-one acreage are over. Many public independents are working from thinning decks. As a result, organic growth strategies increasingly depend on unconventional plays or underappreciated basins where geological risk is higher but so is potential upside—if the land team knows what it’s doing. In that context, land professionals are no longer back-office support. They’re frontline strategists.

This is playing out at the other end of the E&P spectrum as well. Exxon, the world’s largest oil company by market cap, has stayed conspicuously quiet about its Haynesville gas position—until now. While Exxon doesn’t crack the top 10 in Haynesville production, its internal data reveals it holds hundreds of quality locations left over from its XTO acquisition. Those assets, tucked away in East Texas and northern Louisiana, are suddenly looking like crown jewels in a world where gas demand—especially for LNG—is poised to grow, not shrink.

Unlike other operators rushing to secure gas inventory, Exxon already has it. The locations, requiring only ~$3.70/Mcf to deliver competitive returns, are adjacent to Exxon’s soon-to-launch Golden Pass LNG terminal. The company may be sitting on a sleeping giant—and doing so deliberately. With the recent Chevron-TGNR deal highlighting growing Haynesville M&A interest, Exxon’s choice to hold rather than flip reflects a long-term land thesis: better to own irreplaceable assets than overpay to chase them.

That logic is being reinforced by macro forces. Across basins, the cost of acquiring undeveloped acreage is rising faster than the cost of developing it. In the CBP, Ring found itself priced out of multiple acquisitions last year as valuations soared. “Last summer’s prices were a high-water mark,” McKinney noted. Rather than follow the herd, Ring waited, pivoted, and deployed when the value aligned with its land intelligence. That restraint now looks like foresight.

All of this suggests a new era for land strategy in U.S. oil and gas. In a capital-disciplined world, companies that can maximize overlooked inventory, anticipate shifts in regional competition, and thread the needle between consolidation and organic growth will outperform. But that requires capabilities many firms have underinvested in for years. Land functions—often fragmented, under-digitized, and siloed—are becoming a strategic liability where they are not actively cultivated.

The operational implications are vast. From lease negotiations and title management to mineral rights valuation and drilling unit optimization, land decisions ripple through technical and financial workflows. As operators look to extract more value from every acre, integrated land analytics—layering production history, legal risk, and geological models—will separate the smart players from the speculative ones.

There is also a leadership component. Land teams are rarely in the boardroom, but they should be. In mature basins, land is destiny. The companies best positioned for the next decade are not those with the flashiest wells but those with the clearest view of where value lies—and how to secure it before others catch on.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that land is no longer a given. It’s a game—and the smart ones are learning how to play it better.