The Story Behind the Blazed Trail
There are roughly 9,000 independent oil and gas operators in the United States — that is the Independent Petroleum Association of America's own count, and it does not even include the majors. Nine thousand companies to choose from is overwhelming, to say the least. Every one of them will tell you they have the best deal on the table, and nearly every one of them is raising money the same way as everyone else.
I made my first oil investment thirty years ago, in 1994, and I have been vetting deals from the investor's chair ever since — long enough that I will put my read on a deal up against anybody's. But it was 2008 that taught me the lesson that shaped everything Kingdom Exploration does today: hunting your own leases and drilling your own wells — the operator's path — is the gruesome one. I have never drilled or operated a well myself, and watching that path up close is exactly why. Taking a single project from finding a lease worth drilling all the way to a completed well can run upwards of five years. I decided I did not want to be the man who tries to cross the ice first and falls through.
So I went the other direction. I built online campaigns that capture operators who are actively searching for capital — operators who have already made a field discovery and need partners to expand on it. They have already found the oil. They have already crossed the ice. My job is to be the first investor to reach them, and to partner — as the investor alongside the operator, never the one holding the drill bit.
That left one last problem: genuine third-party due diligence on all of those opportunities is gruesome in its own right. That problem has now been remedied with cutting-edge technology we built in-house — more on that soon. You can see the early pieces at Kingdom Scout and in how we vet a deal. — Sean Pruitt, Founder, Kingdom Exploration