Mineral & royalty acquisition
We acquire producing and non-producing mineral and royalty interests directly from owners and heirs, with clear offers, fast diligence and reliable closings.
Mineral & Royalty Acquisition
Acquiring mineral and royalty interests with precision.
Prairie Ridge Energy Partners identifies, verifies and acquires mineral and royalty interests across America's most productive basins, combining decades of land and finance experience with Falcon, our proprietary energy intelligence platform.
Overview
Who we are
Prairie Ridge Energy Partners is a Texas-based mineral and royalty acquisition firm. We partner with mineral owners, heirs and investors to unlock value in subsurface assets, bringing capital, operational discipline and modern technology to every transaction.
Acquisition partnerships
Our leadership has sponsored and managed multiple mineral acquisition partnerships, aligning capital partners with disciplined, data-driven deal selection.
Energy meets infrastructure
Beyond minerals, our team has built and operated data centers powered by West Texas natural gas, a first-hand view of where energy demand is heading.
Permian Basin
East Texas
Appalachian Basin
Proprietary Technology
Falcon
An Energy Intelligence Platform
Built to find what others miss.
Falcon is the platform behind every Prairie Ridge acquisition. It brings sourcing, verification, outreach and closing into one secure workflow, so our team moves from a first signal to a signed deal faster and with greater confidence than traditional land work allows.
Designed in-house, for our own deal flow. Falcon was engineered by our technology partner to fit the way mineral acquisitions actually happen: fragmented county records, complex heirship, and relationships that take time to build.
Falcon is proprietary and used exclusively by Prairie Ridge Energy Partners and its partners.
Opportunity identification
Surfaces mineral and royalty opportunities from public records and proprietary data, then organizes each one as a trackable case.
Verification scoring
Every case carries a transparent confidence score that reflects how well ownership, heirship and contact have been verified before capital is committed.
AI-assisted document analysis
Turns deeds, affidavits, spreadsheets and scanned records into structured, searchable insight and analytical reports.
Owner & heir relationship management
A purpose-built CRM for mineral outreach: contact history, preferences, templates and follow-ups, all tied to the underlying interest.
Pipeline & portfolio reporting
Live dashboards on pipeline health, win rates, deal economics and regional performance, with exports for partners and investors.
Enterprise-grade security
Role-based access, isolated data per organization and a complete audit trail of every action, so sensitive deal information stays protected.
01 · IdentifyOpportunity sourced and logged
02 · VerifyTitle, heirship and ownership confirmed
03 · EngageOwners contacted and offers extended
04 · CloseDocuments generated, deal completed
Leadership
The team behind Prairie Ridge
Operators, financiers and technologists with deep roots in the energy sector and a shared commitment to doing business with integrity.
Paden McKinney
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Paden McKinney is a co-founder of Prairie Ridge Energy Partners and serves as its Chief Executive Officer, where he leads the firm's mineral and royalty acquisition strategy, capital formation, and deal evaluation. He is also a co-founder of Mountain Lion Oil & Gas, LLC, and has sponsored and managed several mineral acquisition partnerships across the Permian Basin, East Texas, and the Appalachian Basin. For the past seven years he has also acquired and built multiple data centers powered by West Texas natural gas.
Paden earned a B.S. in Exercise and Sport Sciences with a minor in Chemistry from Texas Tech University. He lives in Houston with his family.
Jeff Rhea
Chief Financial Officer & Head of Engineering
Jeffrey Rhea is the CFO and Head of Engineering at Prairie Ridge Energy Partners, where he leads oil and gas valuation, underwriting and engineering diligence. He also manages Ray Natural Resources, buying mineral and overriding royalty interests throughout the country, and is CFO of Delta Green / Mountain Lion Mining, a data center operating company with assets in West Texas. He previously served as Senior Corporate Development Engineer at Talos Energy. Earlier in his career he was a reservoir and production engineer at ExxonMobil, working on assets in the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Angola, then an energy investment banking associate at Houlihan Lokey.
Jeff holds a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Oklahoma and an MBA in Energy Finance from Texas McCombs. He lives in Friendswood, TX, with his wife, Cambrie, and their two sons.
Tabitha Logan
Director of Operations
Tabitha began her career in the oil and gas industry as an Executive Assistant working closely with CEOs and CFOs, learning the business from the ground up: operations, strategic planning, financial processes and mineral ownership. She holds a degree in Accounting, which strengthens her analytical approach to financial management in the energy sector.
For the past three years she has specialized in mineral interests, managing operations, coordinating transactions and supporting clients throughout the acquisition and ownership process. As Director of Operations she oversees daily operations with a focus on exceptional client service, streamlined processes and the continued growth of the company, and she is passionate about building lasting relationships with the highest level of integrity.
Jase Snider
Technology Partner · CEO, Jase One LLC
Jeff "Jase" Snider is a solutions architect, engineering leader and product strategist with over two decades of experience building high-availability data systems, user experiences and enterprise AI/ML platforms. He specializes in translating complex operational needs into clear technical roadmaps across enterprise environments and defense operations, and is the architect behind Falcon.
Jase is the founder of Jase One LLC, focused on systems architecture and technology research. He holds graduate degrees and post-graduate certifications in AI, data science, engineering and UX design from Hardin-Simmons University, Texas Tech University, Cornell University and the University of Texas at Austin.
Career highlights
- Dell Technologies: Product Owner and Principal Architect for the Zeus AI/MLOps platform; Product Team Lead for Dell.com, Alienware.com and Dell Financial Services, establishing enterprise accessibility standards; engineered e-commerce features across the core web funnel and a global data-center diagnostic and triage application.
- U.S. Army Software Factory: Architected enterprise data platforms delivering automated operational analytics, briefing senior leadership weekly.
- U.S. Air Force (28th Bomb Squadron / Detachment 14): Architect of a new training management system for B-1 pilots, instructors and weapons system officers at Dyess AFB.
- IBM: Engineered core platform capabilities and led UI design for IBM Cloud VPC and Operations Dashboards.
- AT&T: Managed production billing and ordering systems as a Certified Security Administrator and Team Lead.
Own minerals? Let's talk.
Whether you hold an interest, represent an estate, or want to partner with us, we would like to hear from you.