Most mineral owners are sitting on tools that could save them hours of time, catch payment errors they’d never find on their own, and make them far more informed at every step of owning minerals and royalties — and they don’t even know it. In this episode, we cover easy, free things you can do right now using tools like ChatGPT and Claude to streamline your mineral management. We also pull back the curtain on the more advanced ways the industry is already using AI to streamline title work, track drilling activity, and audit royalty payments. The key theme running through all of it: AI is an amplifier, not a replacement. The more you understand about your minerals, the more you can get out of these tools. Plus, use my free AI Prompt Guide for Mineral Owners to turn a pile of old deeds into a clean, organized mineral rights inventory — even if you have no technical background and no idea where to start.
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AI Is a Powerful Tool — But You Still Have to Know What You’re Looking At
Before diving into the use cases, here’s the most important thing to keep in mind: AI can do a lot, but it cannot do the thinking for you. As I like to put it, AI is like turning up the volume on an amplifier — it makes everything more powerful and more efficient, but only if there’s something worth amplifying. If you don’t understand the basics of mineral ownership, what your royalty statement should look like, or how to read a legal description, AI has no foundation to work from. That’s why my Mineral Management Basics Course is a great starting point to help you on your journey if you don’t have copies of important documents like your oil and gas lease or mineral deed. Once you have that foundation, AI becomes a genuine superpower for managing your interests. Without it, you’re just handing your work to a very confident tool that may or may not be giving you the right answer (like the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out”).
Reviewing Your Royalty Statements for Red Flags
One of the most immediate, high-value things you can do with AI is upload your royalty statements and have it help you spot problems. Take a PDF or photo of your revenue statement, upload it to a tool like Claude or ChatGPT, and ask it to explain each line item in plain language. From there, you can upload two or three months of statements side by side and ask the AI to look for discrepancies. A particularly powerful example: if your net revenue interest — the fixed percentage of production revenue you’re entitled to — changes unexpectedly from one month to the next, that’s a red flag worth investigating. AI can help you understand why that might happen, research what the applicable law says about your rights, and even draft a professional email to your operator’s owner relations department asking the right questions. As Justin points out, AI is especially good at helping you frame those questions in a way that sounds informed — something many mineral owners struggle with when dealing with large operators. As a bonus use case, you can also ask AI to review whether you were paid on time under your state’s prompt payment statutes and, if not, whether you may be entitled to interest on late payments. Bonus tip: do the research beforehand to find the URL to your state statute on oil and gas royalty payments and provide that to the AI tool you are using so that it is using the most accurate information in its analysis.
Reviewing Your Oil and Gas Lease for Unfavorable Terms
Oil and gas leases are long, complicated, and written by attorneys whose job is to protect the operator — not you. AI can help level the playing field. Upload your lease as a PDF to Claude, and ask it to summarize the key terms in plain language: the royalty rate, the primary term, the pooling provisions, the depth limitations, and the cost deduction language. Ask it to flag clauses that are commonly considered unfavorable to mineral owners, such as overly broad pooling authority, the absence of a Pugh clause (which releases acreage not included in a producing unit when the primary term expires), no cost-free royalty language that limits post-production deductions, and shut-in royalty provisions that allow an operator to hold a lease without actually producing. My approach is to use AI to generate suggested alternate language for each problem clause, have that language reviewed and refined by a qualified oil and gas attorney, and then present it to the landman as a markup. This approach can dramatically reduce the back-and-forth with your attorney — and the billable hours — because you’re coming in with a draft rather than starting from scratch. When using AI for legal information, just make sure it is giving you case law citations you can actually verify, not ones it invented.
Calculating Your Net Revenue Interest
Your net revenue interest, or NRI, is the specific decimal that determines exactly how much of a well’s production revenue flows to you each month. Getting it right matters — even a small error in the decimal can mean thousands of dollars over the life of a well. AI can do this math quickly and accurately as long as you feed it the right inputs: the gross acreage of the spacing unit, your net mineral acres in that unit, and the royalty rate in your lease. The formula itself is straightforward, but doing it manually across multiple properties and wells is time-consuming and prone to human error. You can use Claude’s Projects feature to upload your mineral inventory once — with your property descriptions, net acres, royalty rates, and gross unit acreages — so that every time you receive a new division order, you can simply paste in the legal description and ask AI to calculate your expected decimal and compare it against what the operator is showing. We also recommend specifying the exact format you want the answer in to get consistent, usable results. And if you’re still getting comfortable with the difference between net mineral acres and net royalty acres, make sure to check out my free Net Royalty Acre Calculator Worksheet.
Organizing Your Documents and Building a Property Inventory
One of the single biggest time savings AI offers mineral owners is the ability to take a pile of old PDFs — deeds, assignments, leases, and division orders — and extract the relevant information into a clean, organized spreadsheet in minutes instead of hours. In fact, I’ve used this “feature” several times. For example, I’ve been able to take a scanned PDF of a personal representative’s deed from 50 years ago that lists the properties in question (the kind of barely legible document that might normally take an afternoon to work through) and asked Claude to extract the legal descriptions, the ownership fractions, and the gross acreage for each tract, then calculate the net mineral acres based on this information. What would have taken hours of manual data entry was done in minutes. Of course, I still had to perform a quick check to make sure everything was entered correctly. Another potential use case for AI is to build a simple run sheet — the spreadsheet that lists each deed or instrument in chronological order, showing the grantor, grantee, recording information, and legal description — which is the foundation for understanding your chain of title. Get my free AI prompt guide that gives you the step-by-step instructions and copy-paste language to use AI like a pro to do exactly this.
Tracking Activity Near Your Mineral Tracts
Knowing about a new well permit, a pooling order, or a new lease recorded near your minerals — before a landman shows up at your door — is one of the most valuable things a mineral owner can do. It’s also one of the areas where free AI tools currently have the biggest limitations, and it’s worth being honest about that. General AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can’t directly access state oil and gas commission databases in real time because most of those sites block automated access. However, there are practical workarounds you can use today: WellDatabase.com offers a free basic plan with well and production data across the country; Google Alerts set to your county name plus “oil and gas” or “well permit” can surface relevant news; and in states where pooling orders and permit filings are publicly searchable, you may be able to have AI assist in identifying activity if you can copy and paste that data. For those who want automated, reliable monitoring, paid platforms like our sponsor SS&C MineralWare offer proactive notifications when new permits are filed, rigs move onto your acreage, or you stop receiving payments on a well that should still be producing. This is an area where AI-driven tools are developing quickly, and what requires a paid platform today may become available to individual mineral owners at a much lower cost in the near future.
AI for Estate Planning — Protecting the Next Generation
Mineral rights are real property — they don’t transfer to your heirs the way a bank account does when you list a beneficiary. Without a deliberate plan, your interests will go through probate in every state where you hold them, and your heirs may have no idea what they own or how to find it. AI can play a meaningful role in preparing for this, starting with the most important step: building a plain-language inventory of everything you own. Your estate planning attorney’s first question will be “what do you have?” — and most mineral owners can’t answer it efficiently. A complete inventory should capture the legal description of each tract, the state and county it’s in, whether it’s leased or unleased, the current operator, your royalty rate, and where the original documents are stored. AI can also help you prepare for the conversation with your attorney by generating the right questions to ask — for example, what are the tradeoffs between holding these interests in a revocable living trust versus an LLC, and how do those options affect the probate process when you own interests in multiple states? One use case is using AI to draft a personal letter to your heirs: explaining what you own, where to find the documents, who to call, and what steps they’ll need to take. AI has gotten genuinely good at this kind of writing, and it’s an especially powerful cure for writer’s block on something that feels emotionally charged to start. You’ll want to personalize it from the heart — but having AI get you 80% of the way there makes it far more likely that the letter actually gets written.
Important Guardrails: What AI Gets Wrong and How to Protect Yourself
AI can and does make things up — what the industry calls “hallucinations” — especially on legal and technical details. I remember early on asking ChatGPT to identify case law on a specific minerals issue, only to discover the cases it cited didn’t exist. The lesson: always ask AI to provide a source link for any legal citation, and then verify it actually exists before relying on it. State-specific law is another important limitation. Minerals law varies significantly from state to state — what’s true in Texas may not be true in Oklahoma — and if you don’t tell AI exactly which state you’re in and ask it to limit its response to that state’s law, you may get an answer that’s correct somewhere else but wrong for your situation. Privacy is the third guardrail worth taking seriously. When you upload documents to a free AI tool, the default in many cases is that your data can be used to improve the model. For publicly recorded documents like deeds, that’s a limited concern — but for anything with personal financial information, you should pay for the next tier up, which typically allows you to opt out of training, and you should never upload anything containing a Social Security number regardless of your settings. Treat AI like a knowledgeable stranger you’d like to ask for help — not like a trusted advisor you’d share everything with.
Resources
- Free AI Prompt Guide — Free step-by-step instructions for using AI to build your property inventory
- My Mineral Management Basics Course — Step-by-step foundation for understanding what you own, performing a title search, and identifying nearby activity. If you don’t have copies of your mineral deeds and oil and gas leases to build your property inventory using AI, start here, and I will show you how to get them.
- Claude (claude.ai) — Recommended for reviewing legal documents including oil and gas leases, deeds, and purchase agreements
- ChatGPT (chatgpt.com) — General AI tool for royalty statement review, calculations, document summarization, and research
- WellDatabase (welldatabase.com) — Free basic plan for well and production data across the country; useful for monitoring non-producing tracts
- SS&C MineralWare (sscmineralware.com) — Mineral management software with automated activity alerts, permit monitoring, and revenue tracking. Disclaimer: They are a sponsor of the Mineral Rights Podcast.
- NARO (join-naro.org) — National Association of Royalty Owners; use code PODCAST at checkout for $25 off your first year of membership
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The Mineral Rights Podcast should not be construed as investment, legal, or tax advice. Always consult a qualified attorney licensed in the state where your minerals are located before signing any legal document or making decisions based on AI-generated information.
