Carter Collum used to spend the mornings shoulder to shoulder with competitors in East Texas courtroom recording rooms, hunting down the owners of underground natural gas fields. At night, he made home calls, offering payments and royalties for permission to perform.
Mr. Collum worked as a landman, tracking down oil and gas owners trapped in rock layers thousands of feet below the earth’s surface and obtaining their signatures, a job as old as the American oil industry.
It began around 2006, a few years before the shale boom took off and raised drilling rights prices in East Texas to more than $ 15,000 per acre from about $ 250. Successful landmen, running to knock on doors in front of rivals, earned six figures.
“It was kind of like Wild, Wild West,” said Mr. Collum, 39. His predecessors in the field were former President George W. Bush and Aubrey McClendon, the late fracking pioneer who co-founded Chesapeake Energy Corp.
These days, jobs are drying up. Landmen, after raising the peak of the boom, are facing low demand for fossil fuels and investor indifference to shale companies, after years of poor profitability. Instead of oil and gas fields, some landowners provide solar and wind fields, places where the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest.