Jonathon Ringler

This transcript has been edited for readability: Henry Harrison Welcome, Jonathan. It’s a pleasure to have you on the Entrepreneurs, Business and Finance podcast, where we have casual conversations with people I find interesting. Jonathan Ringler Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Henry Harrison We work together, and I know you’re a very smart guy. I also know you’re in oil and gas with a focus on mineral properties. What led you to get into oil and gas? Jonathan Ringler I got into oil and gas back in 2016 when my brother-in-law was buying in the Appalachian Basin of West Virginia. He needed some help reaching out to mineral owners to see if they were interested in selling, as he was buying for a larger outfit at the time. I had wanted to get into the space for a while, but I really didn’t have a good entry point. That gave me a nice way to get started in the industry. Henry Harrison That’s a great way to get into the business, especially when you have someone you can trust and count on. One thing that impresses me about you is that you’re able to do a lot of in-depth analysis across different areas, different properties, and really everything related to oil and gas and owning mineral properties. It’s not an easy field to learn. You’re definitely an entrepreneur and a self-starter, which fits perfectly with the title of this podcast. What do you find interesting about the business, and how did you learn to do that level of analysis? Jonathan Ringler Luckily, I’ve always been strong in mathematics and problem-solving, and that really helped when I eventually branched out on my own. Before that, we were buying for a larger outfit that would hand us a nice, clean map with pricing already laid out. It made acquiring minerals relatively straightforward. What I wasn’t privy to at the time was how they selected areas to target and how they arrived at their pricing. So when I went out on my own, that created a learning curve. I really had to figure out the reasoning behind acquisition strategy — the where, when, and why. That meant spending time digging into the corporation commissions and getting familiar with the states I was acquiring in. I wanted to understand the full process of how an operator gets approved to drill a well. What really became clear to me was that you have to understand well performance in an area. That meant doing decline curves, running PVs, and really figuring out what operators were doing in a particular region. Over the better part of a decade, I’ve been fine-tuning a valuation model that I built, and that has helped streamline the acquisition process. What fascinates me is how even wells just a couple of miles apart can perform drastically differently, especially when operated by different companies. That’s what really pushed me to dig deeper into identifying the top-tier operators, the best areas, the best depths, and everything that goes with that. Henry Harrison For people who may not know, mineral properties are the rights to the property underground where oil and gas is produced. If oil or gas is drilled, the owner receives a royalty. There are so many parts of the oil and gas business — drilling, pipelines, delivery to petrochemical plants, and ultimately the products we use every day. Even this computer and microphone likely contain oil-and-gas-derived materials somewhere in their construction. When you acquire minerals, we’re definitely on the upstream side of the business, but it’s also an interesting niche because we’re more similar to real estate investors than to someone actually going out with a rig and drilling a well. I know you also work with some very extensive spreadsheets. How did you get comfortable with that? A lot of people find software, spreadsheets, and the math involved to be intimidating. Was that just part of your background and something you naturally enjoyed? Jonathan Ringler Yes, I had some experience with AutoCAD and related software, so there were some similarities there. In oil and gas, though, it’s a more technical process. You have to know how to get into an Excel spreadsheet and really manipulate it in the way you need in order to produce a meaningful result. That’s been a big part of it for me. Henry Harrison Where do you see the future of oil and gas? I’m asking in a broad sense — maybe 50 to 100 years out. Jonathan Ringler I think oil and gas is going to be around for a long time. I know there’s a strong push toward renewable energy, and that makes sense in many respects, but oil and gas is still dominant today. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. At the same time, the advancements in drilling have been tremendous. Operators are able to recover much more oil and gas from a typical well now than they could even 20 years ago. A single well today can often do what it might have taken five wells to do 20 years ago. And I think that trend is going to continue over the next five or ten years. Every year, drilling gets a little more efficient. We understand the geology better, we know more about porosity and formation characteristics, and the recovery factor — what can actually be brought out of the ground — continues to improve. Henry Harrison With a new baby recently in your life, I know you’re looking at the long future of oil and gas, and I think I do too. There are certainly good things happening in renewable energy, but oil and gas is still going to be needed for the foreseeable future, and possibly much longer than that. At the same time, the industry continues to improve. Operators are being more careful with wells, emissions, and gas handling. If you can get more oil and gas out of a single well, that means fewer wells, better efficiency, and ultimately something that’s better for the world and for the country. You’re also located in Fort Worth, which is really one of the great centers of oil and gas, not far from Oklahoma and Louisiana. It’s a major part of the onshore U.S. production world. I guess that’s just where life happened to place you. Jonathan Ringler Yes, I’ve been in Fort Worth a long time. I’m actually fifth-generation Fort Worth, and there are deep roots in the oil and gas industry here. Henry Harrison That’s pretty neat. You don’t hear “fifth generation” all that often anymore. Of course, it’s great to have new people coming in too, but I still like hearing that. Well, we wish you all the best. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Jonathan Ringler, thanks for coming on board and joining us today. Jonathan Ringler Thanks so much.