The operator has the surveys, the offset wells and the engineers. The buyer who wrote to you has the same data and a reason to be quiet about it. You have a division order and a number. We rebuild the subsurface picture from the state's own public records and hand it to the one party who has never had it.
The lines behind this statement are not decoration. They are 378 producing wells from the Powder River Basin, oil rate against months on production, drawn straight from the state's public records. The copper line is the median of all of them. One of them may be paying you. Everything here is fitted to data already on this page.
A letter arrives offering to buy your minerals. The number in it was produced by someone with the production history, the directional surveys, the offset well behaviour and a reservoir engineer. You have the letter. The gap between what they know and what you know is not incidental to the offer; it is most of the margin in it.
None of that data is secret. Wyoming publishes it. Every producing well's monthly volumes, every directional survey, every completion record and every log is a public filing, and has been for years. What does not exist is anyone who has assembled it and pointed it at the owner rather than at the buyer.
That is the whole of what Gossans does. We hold 2,570 wells, 277,836 months of production and 228,619 survey stations for the Powder River Basin, indexed by section, township and range. From that we can tell you which wells actually run under your tract and for how many feet, what they have reported producing, how that production has behaved, and what has been permitted, drilled or left alone around them. Then we write it down in language you can take to a lawyer, an appraiser, or a family meeting.
Nobody at that table is disinterested. The buyer is paid more if you sign, the broker is paid because you signed, and the operator computed the number you were given. An analysis worth having is one whose author is indifferent to what you decide, and that is the standard this is being built to.
There is no price list on this page because there is nothing to buy. The company is not formed, and two questions that decide what it can lawfully offer are unresolved: whether analysis of this kind is the practice of engineering, and where reporting a record ends and appraising a property begins. Both are for the Wyoming boards to answer.
Until those come back, this site is the work rather than an offer. Everything on it is built from Wyoming's own public filings: 2,570 wells, 277,836 months of reported production, 228,619 directional survey stations and 531,535 formation tops. The study, the basin model and the decline fitter all run on that, and they are here so the work can be judged before anybody is asked to pay for it.
It will not tell you what your minerals are worth. That is an opinion of value and a certified appraiser is licensed to give it. It will not issue a reserves estimate, and it will not produce anything for a lender, a court or the revenue to rely on.
That is narrower than what the people writing to mineral owners are offering, and the narrowness is the whole point. Everyone else at that table is paid more if the owner reaches a particular conclusion. Reporting what the filings contain and doing the arithmetic is worth more precisely because it is indifferent to the answer.
The most common reason a modelling project stalls is a data request that reads like a discovery motion. Ours does not. For a producing asset in the United States, roughly two thirds of what we need is already public, and we pull that ourselves before asking you for anything.
From you, once
We collect ourselves
Nothing leaves our custody. Data arrives under an NDA signed before the request goes out, is held in a single-client workspace, and is returned or destroyed at your instruction when the engagement closes.
The engagement below is a representative example, modelled on a six-well tight oil pad. The figures are model output used to show the method, not a named client's results.
Two CSV exports. Monthly oil, gas and water by lease with producing days and well count; monthly operating cost from the ledger. Plus one page of lease terms. Nothing else was requested.
The in-house model fitted a single decline curve to total field rate. Three more wells had come online in month twelve, so the rate rose in the middle of the history and no decline curve could fit it. The regression was reported without its quality measure.
Normalised rate per producing well, so adding wells stopped looking like a reservoir doing something impossible. Segmented the history at the last step up in rate, so the fit saw one curve instead of two vintages. Dropped the flowback month. Fitted on the logarithm of rate, because production spans two orders of magnitude and a fit on raw rate ignores the tail the reserve lives in.
The annual model charged drilling capital and first-year flush production to the same period, which flatters the cash flow a discount rate weights most heavily. Separating spud from first sales moved two numbers that matter to different people.
Four improvements were priced with the operations team and ranked on risked value. The one everybody wanted did not survive it. The one that ranked first needed no capital at all.
The gas lift conversion returned nothing because the recovery cap already bound the well: flattening the tail moved no barrels. That is not a judgement about gas lift. It is what this asset's own physics says, and it is invisible without a model that carries it.
These are the errors we find most often, in models built by competent people. Each one is invisible in the output and each one moves the answer in the same direction, which is toward approval.
Adding wells makes total rate rise. No decline curve can fit that, so the regression collapses onto a straight exponential and the recovery estimate follows it.
A "70% decline" is three different numbers depending on whether it is secant, tangent or nominal. Type curves are quoted one way and modelled another more often than not.
A well spudded during a year does not produce for that whole year. Charging both to period one moves cash into exactly the period a discount rate rewards most.
A pit deepens and its best ore goes first. A mine modelled at one strip ratio and one grade across its life is not conservative; it is describing a different mine.
By the time closure is paid there is no production left to depreciate it against. Pooled into capital under units of production, the deduction is stranded entirely.
A plant can be exactly the right size while something upstream is binding. Expansion capital is routinely proposed against the constraint that is easiest to measure, not the one that is holding the asset back.
An offer quotes the gross number a tract has produced, because gross is the largest honest figure available. Net of the decline still to come, and of the share actually allocated to your acreage, the ordering of two offers can reverse.
"We were eleven million light" points nobody at anything. Split into volume, price, cost usage and cost rate, the same eleven million names the department that can act on it.
A gossan is the iron-stained crust that forms where an orebody reaches the surface and weathers. It is not the ore. It is the rust the ore leaves behind, and for most of the history of mining it was the only evidence anyone had. A prospector who could read a gossan knew roughly what lay underneath, how deep, and whether it was worth the shaft, before a single metre was drilled.
That is the discipline this firm is named for. A division order, a monthly statement and a filed survey are the surface expression of something underground that you cannot observe directly and did not choose. The evidence is already public and already says a great deal. The work is reading it correctly, and reading it for you.
The name is plural because the work is. One well tells you about one well. It is the wells around it, read together and on the same basis, read together, that tell you what is actually happening under your ground.
If you own minerals in the Powder River Basin and want to be told when this opens, or if you have found something on these pages that is wrong, both are worth an email. Corrections especially.