Land management software for oil and gas keeps thousands of leases with landowners, each with its own terms, and now uses AI models to read them and pull out what is owed. A lease is a contract in which a landowner gives a producer the right to drill on the land for a set time, in return for money. This software is used mainly in the United States and Canada. In the United States, landowners usually own the oil and gas under their land. In Canada, the provinces own most of it, and other owners, such as companies, hold the rest. In India, the government owns it, so a producer there deals with the government and not with thousands of landowners.
A lease holds many terms. These include the royalty, the share of the income that goes to the landowner. They also include the start and end dates, the acres covered, and any payment due before drilling starts. That payment is called a delay rental. The lease ends when its term ends, unless a well on the land is producing. So a producer in the United States can hold tens of thousands of leases, signed over many decades on paper, and missing one date can lose the right to drill.
The software stores each lease as a record: owner, acres, dates, royalty and payments due. An AI model reads scanned lease documents and fills the records. It works like AI contract review. A person from the land department checks the model's answer before it is saved, as in model drafts, person approves.
Consider a producer that buys another company with 3,000 leases. Its land department must find out which leases end within the next 12 months and which are kept alive by a producing well. In paper files this takes months. Once the model has read the scans, an employee filters the records by end date in minutes and checks the few that the model marked as unclear. The box shows how one lease is read.
The records go on to revenue distribution, which pays the royalty when the well produces. They belong to oil and gas accounting software. Land is also rented for community solar, where a landowner leases land to a solar developer. Indian solar developers likewise rent farmers' land for many years.