The right to run a gathering line, a gas line, or a saltwater disposal line across a surface parcel is recorded at the county register. Easements aggregate across a basin into a map of who has committed to what, and the map often describes subsurface interests more precisely than any equity filing on the operator.
A family office reviewing an investment in a private operator in the American oil and gas basins is usually shown a reserves report and a corporate presentation. The county easement filings show which parcels the operator has actually secured for production and which it has not, and the ratio of secured to unsecured is often the closest available proxy for how much of the reserves report is real inventory.
The easement filing names the grantor, the grantee, the term, the compensation, and the specific capacity contemplated. It is filed at the county at the address of the surface parcel. Aggregating easements across a county over a decade produces a footprint of committed operators, and comparing that footprint against the reported acreage of any single operator produces a check the operator own filings do not.
Reserves are optimistic. Committed capacity is physical. A reader who works from the physical infrastructure backwards has a picture the reserves report was not designed to admit.