About us
An unbiased engineering firm owners can trust
We do not buy or sell minerals, which is exactly why our number can be trusted. Our team brings engineering, geology, land, and appraisal experience to 1,000+ clients across nine states and the Gulf.
Whitney Hornak
COO & Engineer
16
Years of Experience
Becca Andrew
VP & Engineer
16
Years of Experience
Kelly Nall
Project Manager
17
Years of Experience
Why Pecan Tree exists
In 2020, I started Pecan Tree with the mission to bring top-notch engineering to a part of the industry the engineering firms had largely ignored: the mineral space.
My formal training as a petroleum engineer, providing economic valuations and reserve estimates for large companies, taught me all the right ways to solve the problem. I knew anyone who owned oil and gas property would benefit from that kind of work.
The hard part was economics
Providing high-dollar engineering to clients who could only pay a minimal amount was a tough nut to crack. It would have been easy to work only for high-net-worth clients and funded companies and never look back, but the challenge and the need gnawed at me.
To be honest, I did a lot for free. Probably too much. It took a long time to realize that even the best intentions need to be financially stable, and pro-bono work only made sense if most of my time went to paying work. It didn’t. If I wanted to keep doing this work for small interest owners, I needed to engineer a better method.
So I built the model
The best way to provide high-quality engineering at the lowest possible cost was to be very efficient: automate as much as possible, and reuse as much analysis as possible. I did what any good engineer does and built an overly complex Excel file, then a database to house the well and map data. Years of trial and error later, the current model was born. It has grown a lot from its humble Excel beginnings.
