Arin Ernst

Arin Ernst began her career in the oil and gas industry as a field landman in the Bakken Shale, gaining valuable experience running title throughout western North Dakota before attending law school. After graduating, she spent five years as an in-house landman at EOG Resources covering active drilling programs in North Dakota and Wyoming. She then moved into full-time legal practice, drafting oil and gas title opinions, title reports, curative and conveyancing instruments, and building particular depth in ownership calculations through a multi-year project recalculating acreage along a shifting Missouri River boundary. She is licensed in Colorado, lives in West Fargo, North Dakota, with her husband and two sons, and assists operators’ land departments and brokers with title matters.

Recalculating ownership after North Dakota’s Missouri River boundary survey

When North Dakota resurveyed the Missouri River, it issued a new survey covering not just the riverbed but entire adjoining sections, producing acreage figures that differed from the historic assumption behind nearly every existing title opinion in the area and from the federal government’s master title plats. Arin has spent several years assisting operators in recalculating accreted and eroded acreage section by section and reconciling the new state and federal figures so ownership and payments can be trued up. The work is heavy on math, which is the part of title practice she enjoys most, and it remains the project she considers the most interesting title work she has done.

An Excel-based title opinion format

Arin uses an Excel-based title opinion format built on pivot tables, so a land department can refresh its own view of ownership as changes occur rather than waiting for a new document every time something shifts. One client who switched to this format from a prior provider’s work product cut review time by roughly a third.

Spacing, pooling and depth severance issues

Overlapping spacing units, and allocation of production to tracts outside of the drilling and spacing unit, have become one of the larger issues in the basins where Arin works. She tracks how spacing and pooling orders affect allocation of production before a well is drilled, so issues are caught early rather than after the fact. Operators are also increasingly looking at formations above and below the depths they have traditionally drilled, so title opinions she assists with now often cover a broader range of depths on a single tract rather than one target formation, adding more depth-severance questions to the file.