A geothermal power plant venting steam below volcanic ridges, its pipelines crossing open ground
Hellisheidi geothermal plant, Iceland
Projects/Utility-scale geothermal

267,000 acres.Eighteen months.

How a geothermal developer went from scattered spreadsheets to a live, parcel by parcel view of a position across eleven project areas in the West.

Start a project What we did
The position today

One position, every parcel accounted for.

Utility-scale geothermal, Western U.S. The client is confidential. Every figure is read from the client's own record.

266,904Acres under management
1,050Parcels mapped and tracked
342Owners identified
295Severed geothermal estates
717Parcels under lease (69%)
109Leases executed
456Parcels with title complete
11Project areas across the West
6Parcels with a real title blocker

At this scale, a spreadsheet stops being a plan.

Geothermal development lives or dies on land. Before a single megawatt is produced, the developer has to control the ground cleanly, clearly, and contiguously. At this scale that means a thousand separate parcels, hundreds of individual owners, and title conditions that vary parcel by parcel.

The complexity is not hypothetical. On this position the person who owns the land is frequently not the person who owns the resource beneath it. Every one of those has to be identified, researched, and secured separately, and a surface-only review misses all of them.

Tracked in spreadsheets, a position like this becomes unknowable. Deadlines slip. Payments go out on unclear title. Nobody can answer the only question that matters, which is where the position actually stands.

295/ 1,050

parcels carry a geothermal estate severed from the surface. A surface-only title review misses every one of them.

What we did

Four moves, in eighteen months.

  1. 01

    Mapped the whole position

    Every parcel placed on the public survey by township, range, and section, down to the quarter-quarters and government lots its legal description names. Gaps in the position became visible instead of buried in a column.

  2. 02

    Ran title, parcel by parcel

    Surface, mineral, and geothermal ownership researched and recorded separately, which is what surfaced the 295 severed estates a surface-only view would have skipped.

  3. 03

    Negotiated and executed the leases

    717 parcels under lease across 342 owners, assembled one at a time through fragmented ownership, fractional interests, and holdouts.

  4. 04

    Built them the live record

    Not a monthly report. A platform their team signs into, where leasing, title, and estate status sit on real ground, payments are checked against title before they go out, and the firms they hire file their work against the parcels it covers.

The result

The client can answer “where do we stand?” in seconds, across a quarter-million acres.

Before

Quarterly, and already stale

A status deck assembled by hand, out of date the week it was circulated, with no way to check a single parcel behind it.

Now

Current to last night

The position refreshes from the system of record nightly, and any parcel opens to its owners, documents, work, and next obligation.

Now

Nothing paid on unclear title

Every payment coming due inside 100 days is checked against the title behind it and flagged, with the parcels and the reason named.

Now

One record, every firm

Surveyors, permitting consultants and other firms work inside the same record, scoped to their own ground.

Why teams bring us in

What a project like this actually demands.

  1. 01

    Moving into a new area

    Entering a new basin, county, or state means starting from zero on ownership, records, and local practice. We have stood up eleven project areas for this client across multiple states. 11 areas stood up.

  2. 02

    A senior team, not a staffing pyramid

    You work with the people doing the work. No account layer to relay questions through, no juniors learning on your project, no change order to get an answer. Principals on your file.

  3. 03

    Scale without adding headcount

    A thousand parcels and 342 owners tracked continuously, without a land department to match. Software does the tracking so our people spend their time on judgment. 1,046 parcels, small team.

  4. 04

    Complexity is the default here

    Severed estates, fractional owners, holdouts, defective title. On this position 295 parcels have the geothermal estate severed from the surface. That is the ordinary work, not an escalation. 295 severed estates.

  5. 05

    Nothing sits in a black box

    Your team signs into the same live platform we work in, and sees each parcel's leasing, title, and estate status as it stands now rather than as of last month. Live client platform.

  6. 06

    Deadlines caught before they cost you

    Rentals, lease expirations, and permit conditions surface on one calendar with escalating urgency, so nothing lapses because it lived in one person's inbox. One obligation calendar.

The honest part

This took people, not just software.

Our people did

Ran title at eleven counties' records. Found the severed estates. Negotiated with 342 owners. Executed the leases and cured the defects.

Our software did

Placed every parcel on the public survey, measured acreage off the master title plat, read the dates out of leases and permits, and flagged payments against title status.

A geothermal power plant venting steam below volcanic ridges, its pipelines crossing open ground

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