G2 Petroleum, LLC is a privately held oil and gas exploration and investment company based in the McKinney area of the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex. Founded in 2008, it is focused on conventional vertical drilling in North Texas and long term royalty and mineral positions, alongside its sister company Newport Operating, LLC.
The road where oil is ordinary
North Texas has stretches of road where the landscape does not announce itself. A driver can pass a field, a fence line, a low rise of trees, and see nothing that looks like a turning point. Then, if you know where to look, the work shows up in small, practical shapes: a cleared pad, a pump jack, storage tanks set back from the road, the hum of routine.
This is not the cinematic version of oil. It is closer to maintenance. It is paper and planning and repeatable steps. It starts with who owns what, and what that ownership allows. It moves through permits and surveys, decisions made with maps, histories, and limits in mind. And then it becomes metal and cement and time.
G2 Petroleum, LLC has shaped itself around that kind of landscape. Founded in 2008 and based in the McKinney area of the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex, the company sits in a part of the energy world that tends to reward patience. The story is not built on one dramatic discovery. It is built on the discipline of choosing places that have already proven what they can do, and then doing the work that keeps them producing.
That focus did not arrive fully formed. It developed the way many strategies do, through movement, friction, and a few lessons that stuck.
The early years, when the map kept changing
G2’s first chapter begins far from the idea of shallow wells in North Texas.
In 2008, the company and its partners acquired interest in three 13,000 foot Hackberry wells on the Gulf Coast in Lake Sabine, Orange County, Texas. Deep wells. Serious depth. A different pace, a different kind of bet.
It was the kind of start that could have set the company on one path. Instead, it became the first stop in a longer search for what fit.
Not long after, G2 acquired interest in twenty producing 2,000 foot oil wells in Wichita Falls, Texas. The work there was not about the romance of drilling into the unknown. It was about making what already existed behave better. G2 describes working with an operator to stimulate and stabilise production through various treatments and reworks.
That is where the tone of the company begins to show. Even in the way it tells its own history, the emphasis is on improvements that can be seen and measured. A well that produces is one thing. A well that produces more steadily, after careful intervention, becomes a model.
In 2013, G2 negotiated the sale of its interest in that property to a publicly traded oil company. It closed a loop that many young firms chase: find a position, strengthen it, then exit.
But an exit is also a question. What do you do next when you have proven you can complete a cycle?
For G2, the answer was not to settle into a single region or a single type of asset. The company widened its reach.
When prediction stopped feeling dependable
From Wichita Falls, G2 ventured into the Appalachian Basin. Along with industry and private partners, it drilled and completed twenty 2,000 foot wells.
The company’s own summary of that period is blunt in its restraint. It describes the area as very tough to make real oil production. It notes that geological methods, including 3 D seismic and satellite imaging, proved not to work as hydrocarbon identifiers.
In oil and gas, technology often arrives with promises. More data. Better models. Clearer signals. The Appalachian experience, as G2 describes it, reads like an encounter with the edge of those promises.
It is not a story of failure in the dramatic sense. It is a story of limits. Some places do not yield to the same tools. Some basins punish certainty. When that happens, a company either keeps chasing the same kind of answer or adjusts what it is willing to bet on.
G2’s later choices suggest that it adjusted.
After that, its story becomes less about finding the perfect predictive method and more about building positions that can survive imperfection.
The shift from single wells to long horizons
Over time, G2 acquired royalty, overriding royalty, working interest, non operated working interest, and mineral interests in some of the top producing oil and natural gas fields in the United States.
The change here is subtle but important. These interest types are not just financial instruments. They shape how a company relates to risk. They determine who makes decisions, who pays for what, who waits, and who benefits.
In 2011, G2 continued acquiring royalty and mineral acreage in top shale developments in the United States. It holds various interest positions in over 60,000 acres in the Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Barnett Shale.
In the company’s story, this period reads like an investment thesis taking shape. Royalty and mineral acquisitions are described as long term reserves, a way to establish cash flow and growth potential for the next 10 to 20 years. The non operated working interest is described as a way to keep exposure to the drilling side of shale.
The company frames the blend as a hedge strategy, not as a shortcut. The idea is a portfolio that can hold up across cycles, with positions that are meant to last longer than a news cycle or a price swing.
Then comes the DJ Basin.
G2 describes its most recent area of participation as the DJ Basin in the Wattenberg Field in Colorado. It owns royalty interest in over 1,000 wells there, with the potential of an additional 3,000 wells over the next 5 to 10 years.
This kind of scale does not feel like a single bet. It feels like a long view made tangible.
Newport Operating and the decision to keep the work close
If G2’s portfolio tells you how it thinks about time, its relationship with Newport Operating, LLC tells you how it thinks about control.
Newport Operating was founded in 2015, initially to complement G2 Petroleum’s drilling projects. The company describes Newport as allowing Cotton Graham to retain control of all aspects of oilfield drilling and operations, and as providing transparency of costs to G2’s oil investment partners.
G2 also notes that it is currently working with Newport Operating in the Wichita Falls area of North Texas.
This is not the kind of detail that changes a headline, but it changes the texture of a business. In a field where contractors and handoffs can multiply quickly, keeping operations in house is a choice that reflects both philosophy and appetite for responsibility.
G2 positions full control of the day to day operations in the oilfield as a major separator. The logic is practical: services kept in house can minimise costs and maximise profitability. It is also a form of accountability. If you insist on transparency, you need the structure to support it.
The company’s public materials return to this theme again and again, not through big claims, but through how it explains the work.
The drilling process as a kind of proof
One of the more revealing things about G2 is how it talks about drilling.
The company lays out its steps as a sequence, almost like a checklist. It starts with title review and searching the title of the property to the current owner. It moves to survey and permit, then to casing and cementing. It includes perforation and testing, fracking when needed, and completion with a pump jack. Oil is stored in on site tanks until it is picked up by the purchaser.
It is detailed, yes, but the point is not the detail. The point is that the process is not treated as mysterious. It is treated as something that can be shown.
G2 also encourages partners, accredited investors and high worth individuals to visit in person, framing it as education through first hand experience. That invitation carries a quiet confidence. If the work is your argument, then letting people see it is part of the story.
This approach fits a company that says it was built to provide unwavering transparency to its family of oil and gas investors. Transparency, in this framing, is not a slogan. It is a habit.
Wichita County, where the past is part of the pitch
G2 and Newport describe a niche market oil investment opportunity in Wichita County, Texas, an area that has produced over 855 million barrels of oil to date.
In a different company’s hands, that number might be used to suggest scale alone. Here it functions more like reassurance. The point is that the region is proven. The work is happening in a place where history is not just a backdrop. It is an input.
The company describes its main focus as development drilling of conventional vertical wells, primarily in shallow oil sands of North Texas. It argues that drilling in a proven area helps keep drilling costs lower compared to unconventional or deeper, more expensive resource plays.
It also references a geologist who has worked the area for 40 years, suggesting that experience shapes where the company drills and where it does not.
In a business often built on possibility, this is a business built on restraint. The interesting question is not why a company would want to drill. It is why it would choose not to drill in certain places, and how that discipline becomes part of its identity.
The founder’s imprint without turning into a legend
Cotton Graham is the founder and president of G2 Petroleum. He began working in the oil and gas industry in 1994. He founded his first oil and gas development company in 2004, entering the market at $30 per barrel oil and selling holdings near the top of the market at $75.
G2 describes itself as providing venture capital by bringing to market retail oil investment deals and consulting aligned with clients’ interests. It initially sought oil and gas investments in South Texas, North Dakota and Colorado. It now describes itself as investing in oil in the historic Boomtown area of North Texas.
Newport Operating, in the company’s telling, was created to complement drilling projects and to keep control of drilling and operations close, while providing transparency of costs to investment partners.
Outside work, the information provided is deliberately plain: time with his wife and their five children, coaching his daughter’s basketball team, and involvement with the City of McKinney’s lacrosse program. He is described as a Navy veteran with four years of active service. The values of God, Family, and Country are described as being instilled into his parenting. The company notes that it actively contributes to several non profit organisations.
These details do not turn him into a myth. They place him inside the kind of life that lends itself to routines, obligations, and an instinct for responsibility. In the context of G2’s emphasis on family of investors, the personal and the professional themes line up.
The business of risk, and the work of explaining it
G2 does not pretend oil and gas is risk free. It describes direct investments in the industry as speculative. But it argues that much of the risk has been calculated for, citing historical data, geological work, reserve analyses and engineering, and various technologies.
It also foregrounds the financial structure around drilling, especially tax deductions. G2 describes deductions for oil and gas drilling that include intangible drilling costs, depreciation, operating costs, and percentage depletion. It states that investors are able to write off as much as 65 percent to 80 percent in the first year for certain classes of investments, and that in some cases a 100 percent tax deduction is permitted.
The company also states that its drilling programs are designed to return the initial investment within 12 to 24 months and generate multiples on that capital over several years. It argues that who structures a program and how it is structured is often overlooked by investors.
All of this points to a worldview where the product is not only a well. The product is a structure, a set of choices about ownership and accountability that shapes what an investor experiences over time.
In that sense, G2’s story is not just about oil. It is about translating a volatile industry into something legible enough for partners to understand.
Crashes, and the habit of building anyway
G2 describes itself as having shown consistent growth even during oil crashes of 2008, 2014, and the 2020 COVID pandemic.
In its history, the company highlights a moment in 2014 when oil dropped to $27 per barrel. In that period, Cotton Graham signed oil leases on over 2,000 acres in Burkburnett, Texas and created Newport Operating LLC. The company frames Newport as a way to oversee shallow well production and development while providing fact driven information to investment partners.
The shape of the decision matters. In a downturn, many firms focus on cutting, retreating, simplifying. G2’s highlighted response was organisational. It built a structure meant to keep operations and costs visible, when visibility tends to disappear first.
G2 also describes its focus as reducing the obstacles standing between an investor’s money and returns. It emphasises that it does not use outside asset managers or multiple promoters in the distribution of its well programs, suggesting a preference for fewer layers and clearer accountability.
In the company’s own words, control is not a flourish. It is a strategy.
G2 Petroleum now: a hybrid posture
G2 Petroleum describes its current focus as development drilling of conventional vertical wells primarily in shallow oil sands of North Texas. Along with Newport Operating, it describes its work in the Wichita Falls area and the broader Wichita County opportunity.
At the same time, it holds long term royalty and mineral positions across major shale developments and in Colorado’s Wattenberg Field, where it owns royalty interest in over 1,000 wells with additional potential over the next 5 to 10 years.
This combination is the most coherent version of the company’s story. The drilling work offers operational control and direct oversight. The royalty and mineral positions offer duration and breadth. Together, they create a business that tries to stay steady without pretending the industry is steady.
Why G2 Petroleum matters now
G2 Petroleum’s story is a reminder that, in oil and gas, stability is often built rather than found.
It is built through choices that narrow uncertainty: selecting proven areas like Wichita County, focusing on shallow conventional work where costs can be understood, and explaining the process in a way that invites scrutiny rather than avoiding it. It is built by pairing G2’s investment and acquisition strategy with Newport Operating’s emphasis on in house control and cost transparency.
For readers watching how private energy firms try to navigate a world of price swings and shifting narratives, the G2 approach offers a clear lesson. The differentiator is not always a new technique. Sometimes it is the decision to make the work legible, to reduce layers, and to treat operations as the place where trust is earned day after day.
