West Texas Energy Institute

Landman Power - Taking a look at the role landmen play in the development of power and electricity via traditional hydrocarbons, renewables, critical and rare earth minerals, and commercial projects like data centers.

The Emerging Energy Crisis, Securing the Future

If you called your doctor, plumber or mechanic and nobody answered, what would you do? Shortages of critical services have a profound impact on personal and business success. The current workforce providing field land services is at or near retirement age, and recruitment of new talent has been largely unsuccessful.

In this special session, a panel of industry experts assembled by AAPL's 2025-26 Strategic Planning Committee will discuss the challenges of maintaining an adequate, competent field landman workforce, including insufficient incentives, lack of training and professional recognition, and propose potential solutions to the looming issue. 

Read "The Emerging Energy Crisis" on landman.org, a sneak peek at a featured article in the upcoming May/June Landman magazine that delves into this important subject. 

As a landman evaluating AI adoption for your department, your company, or yourself, you need to understand what's actually being said by the people building AI. This session examines perspectives from Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) and Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic), along with other leading AI voices, on the technology's current state and limitations; explores recent legislation affecting AI governance; and discusses emerging ethical frameworks. You'll hear directly what the builders believe, then explore what that means for the land profession.

Gabe Collins will present on a range of projects he's doing now that look at power and water use, the various parts of the property rights stack associated with datacenters and digital infrastructure, and emerging trends that may see datacenters used for training frontier AI models and those used for handling follow-on inference workloads evolve along potentially very different lines.