The University of Wyoming is hoping to use an upcoming conference to shed light on one of the least known majors the university has to offer.
On April 29, the School of Energy Resources (SER) is hosting the Rocky Mountain Professional Landman Conference.
“The landman is the one who actually goes to the courthouse and finds out who owns that specific copper right, or mineral rights, or water right, whatever it is that the mineral company is after, they find out who actually owns that on a plot of land,” SER Academic Director Kami Danaei said.
After this, a Landman is then able to negotiate, write and interpret contracts for all parties involved.
UW is currently home to one of only 10 accredited Professional Landman (PLM) programs in the nation.
“It really is a pretty small number of students that are being produced every year that can do this specific type of career,” Danaei said.
At any given time the number of students enrolled in the program at UW is a close reflection of the oil and gas market according to Danaei.
Recently a PLM student attended the annual meeting held by the American Association of Professional Landman (AAPL), the secondary accrediting body of the program at UW.
While at the event, the student was able to meet with Jim Devlin, the AAPL president, and invited him to Laramie.
Devlin accepted and told the staff and faculty of SER he thought he might be bringing other members of the industry with him to Laramie.
“So, we started thinking ‘how can we make this visit worthwhile for the people that are really high up in this organization,’” Danaei said. “It kind of just evolved from there to be the conference schedule that we have now.”
The conference will kick off with a panel of experts in the industry, who will talk about the recent adoption of renewable resources into the scope of AAPL, as well as other topics yet to be announced.
“We’re having people who have been predominantly in this field for a while talk about ‘what is a landman’ because most people don’t know this is either a major or a career,” Danaei said.
“It really is quite a breadth of things they can cover in this industry, and that’s what this first panel is really about.”
The conference will be headlined by Devlin as the keynote speaker.
In addition, prominent industry figures such as John Lytinksi, from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Fuels, and Randall Luthi, adviser to Gov. Gordon will be in attendance, speaking on the current state of the industry on the national and state level respectively.
This conference comes as a lot of change is occurring in the energy industry, both nationally and locally.
“We just launched our new hydrogen center [in SER]. Kemmerer, Wyoming has just been announced as the location for a new nuclear power plant.” Danaei said.
“There are a lot of things that are changing and evolving.”
Even with the event being over a month away, 30 people have already indicated they will be attending, with a currently expected 80 in total come the day of the conference.
