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About the author:

Ben Binder is a longtime Boulder resident. After graduating from Tufts University College of Engineering, he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years constructing rural schools in Ecuador and on the Galapagos Islands. He later received a Masters degree in Business Administration from Cornell. Ben developed the State of Colorado’s first automated system to track all oil, gas, and geothermal wells in the state, all oil and gas production in the state, the millions of acres of surface and mineral rights owned by Colorado, and all lease and royalty revenues from those lands. The systems he developed for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources were credited by the Office of the State Auditor with finding over $20 million of underpaid royalties on the production of oil and gas from state and federal lands in Colorado. He later worked on the design and development of systems for state land offices and state oil and gas regulatory agencies in New Mexico, Alaska, Nevada, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Montana, Utah, Ohio, Michigan, North Dakota and Washington. Ben played a major role in the design and development of a Risk Based Data Management System for the Ground Water Protection Council under a grant from the US Department of Energy. In 2000, that system was granted an award by the DOE as one of its top 100 scientific and technical projects in the agency’s 25-year history. Ben testified before a United States Senate Special Investigations Committee examining the Department of Interior’s management of Indian oil and gas mineral rights; was an expert witness for the Native American Rights Fund in a landmark class action suit in the Federal courts in Oklahoma; represented Indian allottees as a member of a federal negotiated rulemaking committee writing regulations for determining minimum royalty values for natural gas sold from Indian lands, and assisted the Southern Ute Indian Tribe in their multi-million dollar coalbed methane lawsuit against Amoco.