Who is Black Mountain Energy Storage II? The Texas company that bought the ground south of Kiowa, asked two towns for water, and then handed the site on — and everywhere else in Oklahoma it has recorded paper.

The company

Black Mountain Energy Storage II, LLC is a Texas — a domestic Texas limited liability company, not an Oklahoma one, entity number 0804433138, formed on 15 February 2022 and active. Its registered address is 425 Houston Street, Suite 400, Fort Worth, TX 76102, and its manager, director and registered agent is the same person: Rhett Bennett. That address is the one on the later signature blocks in the Town of Kiowa's records production; the Austin address on the earlier ones appears nowhere in the registry.

It does not work alone. The same name appears on dozens of Texas filings — Black Mountain Royalty, Exploration, Operating, Land Company, Management, Ranch & Cattle — an oil-and-gas land group that moved into energy storage and data-centre sites. Whether this company is registered to do business in Oklahoma is not settled here: the Secretary of State's search returns no match for it, but that search is fuzzy and capped, so the question is left open rather than answered.

What the paper shows it does. It options and buys ground, and then hands the assembled site to a project company. In Pawnee County it deeded its land to Swanson Battery Storage, LLC in October 2024. In Pittsburg County it assigned the Kiowa ground to Emerald ProjectCo Inc. in five instruments in October 2025. Same shape, different buyer.

Where it holds ground

Every piece of ground the two companies' instruments describe, drawn inside the Bureau of Land Management's survey sections. Click a county marker to zoom in, click a tract to see what was recorded on it, and the register below carries the same instruments in full. These are small parcels — most are between ten and forty acres — so at state scale the county markers are the way in.

Black Mountain Black Mountain, then Emerald ProjectCo Emerald ProjectCo section outline, for scale county, sized by instruments town lots, marked not drawn town boundary dashed: the index marks it Partial a dot marks every tract until the shape itself is big enough to read

The five lots in town. Most of these descriptions are aliquot — a quarter of a quarter of a section — and the survey can place them exactly. Five are not. One instrument recorded on 28 May 2025 covers block 97, lots 1 to 5 of the Kiowa townsite: five platted town lots, inside the town itself, about a mile and a half from the Phase 1 district. A platted lot's corners are in the plat filed with the County Clerk, and no public survey carries them — not the BLM's, which stops at sections and their aliquot parts, and not the state's county data, which has roads and precincts but no parcels. So they are marked at the townsite and labelled as not drawn to parcel, rather than given a box that a reader would take for the parcel. Drawing them properly needs the townsite plat or the County Assessor's parcel mapping.

What is drawn, and what it means. Each shape is the piece of ground one legal description names, not the section it sits in: “S28 T3N R13E N2 NE SW” is twenty acres out of six hundred and forty, and drawing the section for it would show thirty-two times the land. The aliquot parts are drawn by regular subdivision of the section’s own corners, the same way the comparison page draws the districts. A dashed edge is a description the index marks Partial: the instrument covers part of that piece and the paper does not say which part, so the whole of it is outlined rather than a guess drawn inside it. That matters for what the map adds up to. Counting no acre twice, the shapes here cover 6,360 acres, of which 5,790 rest on descriptions that name their ground exactly. The remaining 570 rest on a Partial description and are therefore drawn larger than the ground conveyed. The true figure is somewhere between the two, and nothing in the public record narrows it further.

And what it is not. A shape here is ground some instrument names — an option, a lease, a deed, a mortgage, a release. It is not a statement that either company owns it today: an option lapses, a memorandum gets released, a mortgage is a lien and not a title. Two lots in Atoka County are left off the map entirely, because a lot is an irregular remnant whose shape is in the survey plat rather than in its description, and guessing at it would be worse than leaving it out. They are in the register below.

What Emerald holds

The project company's own paper, from the same statewide search. 24 instruments: 23 in Pittsburg County and one in Atoka. Its stated consideration totals $83,681,678 — the county index's own figure for what was paid, which is not the same thing as the documentary-stamp bracket the comparison page reports. The stamp is what the instrument itself supports; this is what the clerk's index records. Where they differ, the paper governs.

The register

Every instrument, newest first within each county. Recorded is the day the clerk stamped it; dated is the date on the instrument itself, which is often months earlier. Money is the clerk's own figure.

How this page was made

The instruments come from okcountyrecords.com, which publishes the indexes of the Oklahoma counties that take part, searched for the company's name across every county it carries on 22 September 2026. A county that does not publish its index cannot appear here, so a blank county means nothing was found rather than that nothing was filed, and the search covers one spelling of one name.

The shapes are the Bureau of Land Management's national PLSS survey. Oklahoma is surveyed from two principal meridians — the Indian Meridian over most of the state, the Cimarron Meridian in the panhandle — so a township and range names one square mile in each. Each section here was matched against the county that recorded the instrument, and the map is not written at all unless every section can be placed inside its own county.

One instrument was found a different way, and it is worth saying how. The register was built by searching the county indexes for Black Mountain Energy Storage. Instrument 2026-005838 — a release recorded on 23 June 2026, the day after the Board tabled the districts, over the north half of section 34 — is indexed under Black Mountain Energy II LLC, without the word “Storage”, so that search could never return it. It surfaced because a copy of it came over the counter in the County Clerk’s production and had no row here to match. Searching the Pittsburg index for “Black Mountain” alone returns twenty-three instruments; the three not listed below are all Blackjack Mountain, an oil-and-gas partnership recorded in 2015 and 2016, years before this company existed. So the twenty below are every filing in Pittsburg County under any spelling of the name.

Two hits are left out: bulk utility filings in Osage County that list seven hundred names, this company's among them, and describe no land. The registry details come from Texas Secretary of State and Comptroller records read on 22 September 2026.

What is paper here, and what is only an index entry

This matters for how much weight a row can carry, so it is worth being exact about it. 38 of these instruments were bought as paper at the County Clerk's counter, in two productions, and are published on this site page by page. Of those, 5 are certified copies — the five-instrument assignment chain by which Black Mountain handed the site to Emerald ProjectCo, which the clerk certified per instrument. The other 33 are plain counter copies: the same images, without the clerk's certificate. A certified copy stands on its own; a plain copy is a photograph of the record and is offered here as one.

The 12 instruments in the other six counties are index entries only. No copies have been obtained, because a Pittsburg County records request cannot reach an Atoka or a Pawnee county clerk, and six more requests is more than this is worth. So for those rows the page reports what the index records — the date, the parties, the type, the money and the land — and nothing about what the documents themselves say.