‘Take control of

That’s the slogan of MineralTracker, a North Dakota-based startup whose

A Q & A WITH JEFF KUMMER, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT

Q.LET’S START WITH YOUR PRODUCT. TELL US ABOUT MINERALTRACKER.

A.MineralTracker is mineral management software. It gives mineral owners a dashboard through which they can see several important things.

First, by simply entering their wells and their interest, they can see a prediction of what they should have been paid in the past, month by month. Second, they can get a projection of what they should be paid in the future.

The way the software works is that it agglomerates a lot of publicly available data, such as the monthly reports that the oil and gas companies make to North Dakota. These reports document how much oil and gas is being produced for each individual well.

Q.

The software also accounts for historical commodity prices, taxes and other factors.

So again, by knowing the wells and the interest that Grandma Smith has, we can tell Grandma Smith that in June of 2018, she should have been paid X by Oil Company A. That way, when she gets her check in the mail, she can look at how much she was paid, and she can go to MineralTracker to see if the amount is correct.

It’s an audit tool, in other words. And we think that’s valuable, because otherwise, there’s no efficient way to audit your royalty check on a monthly basis.

Instead, most people just default to getting the check, looking at the amount and seeing it as a blessing.

PART OF MINERALTRACKER’S APPEAL COMES FROM THE OIL-AND-GAS BACKGROUND OF ITS DEVELOPERS. HOW DID YOU GET YOUR START?

A.The company is based in Watford City, N.D. I grew up here back when Watford City was a small little town, and my wife is from here as well. My family had been in the oil-and-gas business for three generations, and now, I guess I’m the fourth.

I started by getting a degree in petroleum engineering. I started at the University of North Dakota, then finished out my degree in 2006 at the Colorado School of Mines.

From there, I did what most petroleum engineers do: I went out and worked for oil and gas companies. I spent the first couple of years in Wyoming. Eventually, I wound up back in North Dakota and ended up being the president of MBI Energy Services, which in 2014 was the fourth largest independent business in the state.

To make a long story short, I spent lots of time as a petroleum engineer drilling and completing wells. So, I really understood the operational aspects of working for an oil and gas company. Then in 2013, my father passed away. He’d been handling all of my family’s mineral interests. So after he died, my mom had no clue about any of it.

I started helping her, and a light bulb went off. I asked myself, “If it’s this hard for me as a petroleum engineer to understand these revenue statements, what are the other thousands of mineral owners doing?”

Outside of going to an attorney, there was no service that I could see that would let mineral owners get their questions answered from people knowledgeable about the oil and gas business.

That was the seed. So in March 2017, I started a business called McKenzie Minerals Management. The goal was to open the doors for folks to come in with their paperwork and their questions, and for us to try to solve their problems or provide some answers.

We’ve been doing that now for a year and a half or so.