The Tarrick Methodology

Four disciplines running through your estate as one practice.

Where the work on your estate starts depends on what questions you have. A lease concern, a valuation, or a statement that looks wrong are all places where we can begin. From there, the records are fed through all four disciplines of our methodology.

Lodemark was founded on petroleum engineering and management consulting. Our engineering contributes the reserve, production, and valuation work. The consulting framework allows us to read your land, engineering, and revenue as one position. We call this combined approach Tarrick.

How it works

The four disciplines begin the work on your estate with your question.

Enter at any one

You need a forensic review Integrated Discovery You need money recovered Value Realization You need a reserve report Strategic Forecasting You need an ongoing watch Active Monitoring

The four feed each other

Herald carries findings to your decision makers On the cadence you require

The watch continues

Discipline 01

Integrated · nothing falls between the reports

Integrated Discovery

Discovery reveals the value your estate may be owed but is not collecting, what we refer to as the Shadow Portfolio. Land, petroleum engineering, revenue, and accounting look at your estate at the same time. One discipline looking alone doesn't see the whole picture, but together they see the missing value, name it, put a number on it, and trace it back to a source record you can check.

What's found is based on what our engineering team says the estate should produce, measured against what the checks have paid over the years.

From a railroad engagement

$3.5M⁺

Recovered across four kinds of missed value on a single estate, all four Shadow Portfolio components present.

Land position review. We map your full acreage and compare it with the title record to see what is owned, what is leased, and where the gaps are.
Royalty statement audit. We read your historical statements line by line against the lease terms to find and size the calculation errors.
Suspended funds review. We work with operators and dig through title to find revenue sitting in a suspense account with your name on it.
Surface rights review. We make sure the rights protected by your lease provisions are being enforced, any ambiguous language is being fairly interpreted, and your future rights within your specific lease parameters are protected.

Discipline 02

Value · found and collected

Value Realization

Realization recovers your estate's missing value revealed by Integrated Discovery. Mostly, what we find is errors that compound, records that drifted and were never corrected. Our job is to correct these errors and get the money back to where it belongs. When we find errors, we build a documented case supporting our work before we reach out to an operator.

From a long-term engagement

$201K

An overhead overcharge that was compounding a small amount each month. We identified and recovered it.

From a leasing and royalty engagement

$1.1M⁺

The royalty raised five points on a single lease. It keeps paying for as long as the lease produces.

Forensic review of operator behavior. We look at the full payment record for anything that does not look right, such as the cost of drilling a well versus what it should cost, or a change of ownership.
Operator audit and contract enforcement. We check the division order interest with the lease and the title record, confirm each payment follows the lease terms, and note anything that doesn't, like a changed decimal, a deduction not allowed in the lease, or production that went missing between operators. If we find something, we document it and take it to the operator to get it corrected.
Engineering against the production data. We compare the volume on your check with the volume the operator reported to the state. If your check reports the volume as 425 but the filing has 799 recorded, we find out why. Then our engineering team works out what the well should have produced in the first place.
Financial operations against the revenue cycle. We make sure you are paid royalties for every producing month. If you don't get payment for a month, we let you know why. For a new well we make sure you get your first payment within the timeframe your lease states, and if it's late, we go after the interest you are owed.
Advocacy for the owner. We have no ties to the operators, so the only side we are on is yours. Because we are part of the industry, we also have the relationships to actually get something moving.

Discipline 03

Strategic · what's ahead for your estate

Strategic Forecasting

Forecasting shows you what your estate is likely to produce and what it's worth. So, when a sale, an acquisition, a divestiture, or an estate event requires you to make a decision, you have the information you need to act. Our engineering team provides the reserve estimates, production projections, and estate valuation work with deliverables supported by the data.

We value your estate on what it can produce, compared with what it has paid over the years.

From a basis engagement

$4.1M

A fair-market basis set as of a past transfer, established from the reserve appraisal.

Production projection. We produce engineer-grade projections built on decline-curve analysis and verified historical production.
Reserve estimate. Reserve estimates for your whole position are built from the geological and production data available.
Valuation work. We value your mineral estate for a sale, a lender, an estate, or capital planning, drawing on land, engineering, and revenue together, to a standard trustees or the IRS will accept.
Capital planning support. Multi-year planning analysis for an acquisition, a divestiture, or a development decision.
AFE review. For leasehold and working-interest owners, our engineering team checks each AFE against what the well should cost and produce, before you elect to participate or go non-consent.

Built in-house, run on live data

Because the reserve, decline, and valuation work is owned by Lodemark, we can run it on live operational data instead of as a snapshot and put a value on the estate your board can trust.

Discipline 04

Active · every month, on every statement

Active Monitoring

Active Monitoring runs continuously across your entire estate, looking for the small inconsistencies that get passed along. A deduction that should not be there, a decimal that drifted, a deadline about to pass are all errors that compound. Caught in the first cycle they may cost you nothing or very little, but left alone, they can add up and remain unnoticed for years.

When we catch one of these errors, we do more than just report it. We make it a pattern that we watch for on every estate we manage. Each finding we make and add to our watch list makes the next review on your estate stronger.

Operator behavior. We track payment behavior and production reporting against a baseline for your estate, so a change is caught before it adds up.
Payment accuracy. We check every royalty statement against your lease terms. What was paid, what was deducted, and how the payment was calculated are verified before the month closes.
Lease enforcement. We track expiration dates, renewal windows, drilling obligations, and surface-use provisions across your estate, and flag deadlines before they arrive.
Portfolio drift. We watch your whole estate for acreage gaps and allocation shifts while they are still fixable. Anything we find goes back through the other three disciplines.

Caught by the watch

$201K

An overhead charge the operating agreement did not allow was compounding a small amount each month across years of the engagement.

Custos / the guardianship platform

Active Monitoring is the discipline. It's the work of watching your estate. Custos is the intelligence layer all four disciplines run on, and it reads every estate we manage at once. That is how a pattern we find on one estate is checked on all of them.

What the work runs on

Three layers support the disciplines: Custos reads the estates, Herald reports the findings, and MineralForce holds the data.

Custos reads the estates, Herald reports the findings, and MineralForce holds the data.

Custos / Guardianship, the watch

Custos is the intelligence layer. It reads everything on every estate we manage at once, so a pattern found on one estate is checked on all of them.

Herald / Communication

Herald carries what the disciplines find to the people who act on it: a board or investment committee, the trustees or a trust officer, the general counsel, or a family and its advisors. The reporting is delivered to you in the format your decision makers will read, on the cadence you require.

The platform beneath the work

MineralForce, launched 2011.

MineralForce holds the data all four disciplines work from: everything tied to your mineral estate, from title, properties, and leases to production, revenue, expenses, and AFEs. We started building it in 2010 and launched it in 2011. More than a decade of use has shaped how the data connects on an estate. It is our own proprietary platform, built for the way we work.

MineralForce, Custos, and Herald are our own systems. Artificial intelligence is in use across them, but we don't depend on it. Every record supporting a finding is checked by a person and traces back to a source document.

On artificial intelligence

The estate record is an owner's whole position: every instrument, lease, division order, volume, receipt and expense, and how they connect. Operators change, purchasers are acquired, wells are recompleted, generations turn over. The record persists. Keeping it is what we are hired to do.

Title is the record of who owns the minerals and how that ownership arrived. The record carries the instrument itself, its legal description by section, township and range or by survey and abstract, the net mineral acres it conveys, and where it is recorded. When a purchaser's records disagree with ours, this is what we go back to.

An oil and gas lease is the agreement that gives an operator the right to develop minerals, but does not relinquish ownership. We negotiate the best possible terms that determine what the owner is paid: royalty rate, primary term, extension options, shut-in and pooling provisions, and whether post-production deductions are permitted. Expiration dates are tracked forward so a lease lapse does not go unnoticed.

A producing property references either a stand-alone well or a group of wells within a pool, unit, or tract. The owner's interest in it comes from the lease, the title and, where wells are pooled, the unit allocation. Those numbers don't always agree between an operator, a purchaser, and an owner's own records, and reconciling them is most of the work. Every revenue line, expense, division order, and production volume in the system hangs off one.

An Authority for Expenditure is the operator's estimate of what a well will cost, sent for approval before it is drilled. For a working interest owner it is the moment to elect: participate, or go non-consent and take the penalty.

Expenses are what comes out before an owner is paid: post-production deductions for gathering, compression, dehydration, processing and transportation, and severance and ad valorem taxes. Whether a deduction is permitted is a lease question, not an accounting one; which is why the lease and the expense live in the same record.

Revenue is the detail: the purchaser, property, product, production month, volume, price, decimal interest, and deductions taken. It is the most granular record in the system and the longest-running. Fifteen years of it on a single property is what makes an underpayment visible. One month never is.

Production is the volume of minerals pulled out of the ground and processed to make it marketable: oil in barrels, gas in Mcf, by month, by well. It is stated on the revenue details provided by the operator or first purchaser, and also reported to the state regulatory agency. Production is the check on revenue: volumes that move without a corresponding payment are the first sign something is wrong.

A division order is the payor's statement of what it believes an owner's decimal interest to be, sent for signature before payment begins. The payor is whoever pays the owner: the operator or the first purchaser. It is not title and it does not change ownership; it records what the payor will pay on. We compute the interest independently from the title record and compare. A division order signed without that check locks in someone else's arithmetic.

What the methodology has produced

Figures from live engagements.

$3.5M⁺

Recovered on a single railroad engagement

11 ×

Lifetime return on the engagement, fees to recovery

Since 2011

Structured estate data on our own platform

See the engagement record

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