MARC Houston 2024
MARC Houston is the Mineral and Royalty Conference that I was asked to photograph through one of the lovely gents at the World Oilmen’s Poker Tournament (WOPT) in Las Vegas, NV. So once again, it was an event that was more like a fun family reunion with a lot of the people that I’ve gotten to know over fifteen years! It was fascinating to learn about this facet within the oil and gas industry because I had no idea what this whole conference was about! Basically, if you own a property, you may not necessarily own the property waaaay underneath your land – like to deepest layers of the Earth where lots of valuable minerals and resources are found for mining. It depends on what kind of deed you have of your land, so if you own the minerals all the way down to the core of the earth, it's public record. Apparently, sometimes things like that can go back to 100+ years of land deeds. So these people in the mineral world can either approach you about buying the rights or leasing the rights to drilling the minerals underneath your land. Basically it’s a way everyone can make good money, but that is essentially what this conference revolves around! Of course now, they’re looking into how to use AI to figure out who owns what land and whether they have the mineral rights or not, looking at the best areas that are potentially untapped…etc.! It's actually all really fascinating and I was thrilled to photograph such a cool conference.
Later on in the evening, they turned the conference room into a mini faux casino and all of it was to raise money for a local school program to help feed kids who can’t afford school lunches. I loved that they tied philanthropy in with such an interesting aspect of their work.
