In the first episode of Taylor Sheridan’s hit TV series Landman, lead character Tommy Norris, played by Billy Bob Thornton, is held prisoner by the Mexican cartel and a massive oil tanker and airplane collide in a fiery explosion.
While Tom Seng, an assistant professor of energy finance at Texas Christian University, admitted those scenes were entertaining, he said they don’t reflect what life is actually like as a landman.
“I have yet to run into a landman who said he was battling cartels in West Texas,” he said with a chuckle.
What is a landman? Someone who negotiates land rights on behalf of energy companies.
That’s part of what 25 undergraduate students will learn in the spring in a new eight-week seminar at TCU called “Land Management and Land Administration.” The course, while inspired by Landman, is not exclusively about the show. Instead, Seng will teach students what it means to be a landman and prepare them for a certification exam through the American Association of Professional Landmen (AAPL), which is headquartered in Fort Worth.
Seng said students will hear about the profession from Midland and Fort Worth landmen, including a TCU alum couple who own a mineral management company.
During his 30 years as a trader in the natural gas industry, Seng said, he worked with several landmen. He said there are certain stereotypes about old-school landmen like “the guy with the Cadillac with the longhorns on the hood.”
But he said the face of the modern-day landman has changed as younger generations join the ranks and the number of women in the profession increases.
Another change Seng notes is that the profession has expanded to include cutting deals to build wind and solar farms, not just oil and gas pipelines.
“Today's landman,” he said, “is probably further away from the Billy Bob Thornton character than they were, let's say 20 years ago.”
Employers and students seem interested in growing a pipeline of landmen, Seng said, and both undergraduates and MBA students at TCU have expressed interest in the course, though it’s only for undergraduates right now. Over the years, oil and gas companies have also reached out to recruit student interns who have studied land management.
TCU has another connection to Landman as a filming spot for Seasons 1 and 2. New episodes for Season 2 are dropping on Sundays Paramount+.
Ultimately, Seng wants to give students a deeper understanding of the profession.
“I think students want to truly understand, 'OK, I saw the series, it was really fun. But what is that really about?'”
By the end of the course, they won’t have to rely just on Landman to understand landmen.
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