For a long time, non-operated joint venture (NOJV) management had a reputation problem. Not because they performed poorly, but because of how people thought about the function: a passive income stream, managed by accountants, funded by checks, ignored until a JIB arrived or an AFE deadline slipped by. However, serious non-op teams have been doing the hard work for years, it just rarely made the highlight reel to the market.
At Enverus EVOLVE 2026, Jeb Burleson, Director of Product at Enverus, hosted a panel on the operator/non-operator relationship by observing that the NOJV space is hotter than it’s ever been as an investment vehicle. The panelists described the rigorous technical work that their teams do every day, and why it is getting its share of the limelight recently.
Thomas Fitz
CFO
Brigham Exploration
Andrew Armpriester
General Manager North America Non-Operated Joint Venture and Royalty
Chevron
Scott Rice
Managing Partner & COORiverbend Energy Company
Aaron Tenenholz
VP of Land & BD
Fortuna OpCo
How The Experts Approach Non-Operated Joint Venture Management
Scott Rice of Riverbend Energy has done extensive technical work with his team, arriving at operator meetings with independent estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) figures and completion design opinions, so that they can be a sophisticated part of the stack, rather than capital sitting quietly in the well. His team is known for bringing a strategic lens and a valued perspective to the table with their partners.
Aaron Tenenholz of Fortuna OpCo walked through six distinct deal types his team navigates, from white space leasing to wellbore market transactions, each with its own analytical demands and its own risk profile.
Andy Armpriester of Chevron’s North America NOJV and Royalty group described managing roughly 20,000 wells with a team of about ten people, synthesizing data from hundreds of operators who each format their information differently, use different nomenclature for the same formations, and in some cases still send AFEs by mail.
Thomas Fitz, CFO of Brigham Exploration, mentioned that they have a partner that wants feedback from their no-op partners to guide their decisions through benchmarking their cost data in the Permian to understand what they’re doing right and wrong, what other costs and mechanisms other folks are seeing. He emphasized that “creating that two-way street is going to be super helpful.”
The Market Has Caught On: Why Managing Non-Operated Joint Ventures Is Becoming More Strategic
Strategic joint ventures between E&P operators and private equity portfolio companies are increasing, driven partly by the desire to share costs on large development programs and partly by the consolidation wave reshaping which operators control which acreage. Northern Oil and Gas completed over 40 transactions in Q1 2026 alone and is currently evaluating more than $10 billion in asset packages. PE-backed non-ops face firm timelines, defined return hurdles, and reporting obligations that turn every consent decision into a capital allocation decision with downstream consequences for the fund.
Why NOJV Data Infrastructure Has Not Kept Pace With Strategic Ambition
Tenenholz described the standardization problem at EVOLVE: “There isn’t any uniformity. Every JIB looks different. Every division order looks different. Every well proposal looks different.” His team at Fortuna manages $1.4 billion in assets under management with a lean staff, where every hour spent on manual data processing is an hour not spent on the decisions that actually drive returns. Armpriester noted that even when Chevron receives data cleanly, they still have to translate it into their internal nomenclature before it’s usable. Thomas Fitz of Brigham Exploration was direct about where his team’s energy is going first: “The cleanliness of the data, the focus on the process; we think that’s the foundation that needs to be set.”
What The Leading Edge Of NOJV Management Looks Like Today
Riverbend has AI tools in the hands of every employee, built on a data foundation two decades in the making. NOG evaluates every development package against analyst-verified inventory and their own proprietary type curves before bidding, so they’re never working from seller representations alone. Some operator OBO teams now use GPS rig tracking to monitor non-op partner activity weeks before the JIB arrives. The common thread isn’t technology for its own sake. It’s having the right information at the moment of decision, rather than after it.
The teams without that infrastructure aren’t just slower. They’re making consent decisions, capital allocations, and operator evaluations on information that’s already stale.
Enverus Benchmark & Optimize solutions are built for exactly this gap. Real-time AFE benchmarking means you’re not consenting blind. Integrated cost analytics surface the outliers your lean team would otherwise catch weeks later, if at all. Portfolio forecasting puts cash flow timing and revenue impact in front of you before capital commits, not after. And unlike a consultant’s one-time analysis, the data updates continuously, so your team is always working from current market conditions, not last quarter’s snapshot.
Key Takeaways for Non-Operated Joint Venture Management:
- The non-operated working interest is now a strategic function, not a passive one. Leading non-op teams run independent EUR models, track operator performance across multiple cycles, monitor partner activity in near real time, and manage capital allocation.
- The operational infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the strategic ambition. Disparate AFE formats, inconsistent JIB nomenclature, and reactive data flows mean that even sophisticated non-op teams spend significant time on manual processing rather than decision-making.
- The gap between leading and lagging non-op operations is compounding. Teams using real-time activity monitoring, and analyst-verified inventory data are making faster, more defensible decisions than peers still relying on operator-provided information and spreadsheet models.
