Oil and gas exploration sounds simple: find where the hydrocarbons are buried, drill, and produce. In practice it is a data business. Before any company commits hundreds of millions of dollars to a well, it needs a picture of what lies thousands of feet below the surface. That picture comes from seismic surveying, the practice of sending sound waves into the earth and reading the echoes to map the rock layers below.

This is where Jim Rickards, the former general counsel at Long-Term Capital Management, best-selling author on currency and geopolitics, and editor of model Press’s Strategic Intelligence letter, enters the story. His “$150 Trillion Birthright” presentation, also called American Birthright Phase II, argues that President Trump “opened 650 million acres of federal land containing an estimated $150 trillion in buried minerals.” The pitch then pivots to three “MDP” companies, short for mineral-discovery-technology plays, that he says could dominate the discovery work. The catch, and the reason this article is about oil and gas exploration rather than mining, is that all three companies earn most of their revenue from energy, not minerals.

How Seismic Exploration Works

Seismic crews generate controlled sound energy, often with vibrating trucks on land or air guns at sea, and record the reflections that bounce back from each rock boundary. Computers turn those reflections into images of the subsurface, and geologists read those images to decide where to drill. The company running the survey gets paid for the data and the imaging, whether or not a client ever finds oil.

That is the pick-and-shovel logic at the heart of the Birthright pitch. Surveyors and equipment makers collect revenue from activity, not from discovery. If exploration budgets rise, their order books fill up before anyone confirms a single new find. If budgets fall, they feel it first. This is a genuinely lower-risk way to participate in an exploration cycle, and it is the strongest part of the thesis Rickards is selling.

Where the Birthright Pitch Fits

The presentation quotes the claim that mining companies will be “legally required to find the exact location of these mineral deposits BEFORE they can dig a single hole.” That is true in spirit, locating a deposit before disturbing ground is standard practice. The leap comes next. Rickards argues that three small firms with patents could dominate this discovery technology and that “the market for their services could explode from $2 billion to $100 billion over the next 12 months.”

Our teardown of the presentation found a different reality. Federal leasing grows gradually. More than 23 million acres are already under lease for oil and gas, and total acreage under lease rises on the order of one percent a year. Mineral claims on BLM land are not even auctioned the way oil and gas tracts are. The mandate the ad describes as a clean new-market event does not arrive as suddenly as the framing suggests.

The Three Picks Are Energy Companies

“The Pioneer” is Geospace Technologies, a Houston-area maker of land and marine seismic equipment with about $116 million in trailing revenue, much of it from defense and international work. “The Wildcat” is TGS ASA, the Norwegian energy-data firm formed from the 2023 merger of TGS and PGS, which licenses large offshore seismic data sets. “The Innovator” is MIND Technology, the maker of Seamap-brand offshore seismic hardware such as the SeaLink streamer. All three are oil and gas seismic companies whose revenue has tracked energy exploration budgets and the oil price for decades, not mineral discovery.

For the rare earth and critical minerals angle, our critical minerals strategy explainer walks through where the real policy action sits. The Birthright picks are an energy-services bet wearing a mining costume.

The Scoreboard Since the Tease

The presentation attached specific targets to each pick: “4,800% gain potential” for Geospace Technologies, “1,520% gain potential” for TGS ASA, and “4,340% gain potential” for MIND Technology. The catalyst, a June 24, 2025 date the pitch tied to unlocking Phase II, came and went with no surge. Since then Geospace Technologies is down 73.8%, MIND Technology down 56.8%, and TGS ASA is up 8.9%. Against promises of four-digit gains, that is one single-digit gain and two large losses.

Why the Mechanism Still Matters

None of this means seismic exploration is a dead end. A genuine rebound in energy exploration spending would help all three companies, and the surveyors genuinely do get paid on activity rather than outcomes. The honest takeaway is that the opportunity is real but slower and more cyclical than the presentation implies. For a closer look at how the survey data business actually works, our deep-sea mining explainer and our AI mineral exploration coverage explore the adjacent themes.

The Birthright pitch is a marketing presentation for the Situation Report, priced at $1,995 per year with no refunds. The companies behind it are legitimate, the mechanism is real, and the numbers deserve a careful read. Wait for evidence that exploration spending is actually rising before treating any of the three as a secret about to surge.

Ready to see the research? Click here to view the American Birthright presentation.

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