Houston, TX — June 16,2026 — Pepper Energy Partners today announced the launch of The Iron Horse Assessment, a new data discovery and remediation solution designed to help energy companies identify, quantify, and eliminate the growing burden of redundant, outdated, trivial, and abandoned (ROTA) data.
The launch comes at a critical time for the industry. Energy companies are managing rapidly expanding volumes of unstructured data across shared drives, legacy systems, and cloud platforms, with an estimated 50–80% of that data delivering no business value while still consuming budget and increasing risk. This unused data is not just a storage issue. Organizations are spending hundreds of thousands annually to store data that is never used, while fragmented data environments can drain enterprise value through inefficiency and missed insight. At the same time, the average cost of a data breach costs companies millions, and data centers continue to drive a growing carbon footprint tied to unnecessary storage.
The Iron Horse Assessment is built to directly address these challenges.
Developed as the culmination of Pepper Energy Partners’ 10 years of experience digitizing and managing energy data, Iron Horse provides a fast, structured path to visibility and control. In less than two weeks, the solution delivers a complete inventory of unstructured data, classifies it by business value and risk, and identifies 40–70% of data that can be safely archived or removed.
“Iron Horse is the natural next step in our mission to empower energy’s data transformation,” said Kristen Pepper, President of Pepper Energy Partners. “For a decade, we have helped operators digitize and organize critical documents across land, accounting, and operations. What we are seeing now is a new problem at scale: companies are overwhelmed by data they cannot see, cannot trust, and cannot use. Iron Horse gives them a clear, defensible way to take control, reduce risk, and build a clean, AI-ready data foundation.”
Unlike traditional data audits, Iron Horse moves beyond analysis to execution. The solution combines automated classification, ROTA segmentation, and a defensible remediation plan with full audit trails and certificates of data destruction, ensuring compliance with internal governance and industry standards.
The impact is immediate and measurable. Companies can reduce storage costs, shrink their risk footprint, and return valuable time to technical teams who currently spend up to 80% of their effort preparing data instead of generating insight.
“Working with the team at Pepper Energy Partners on our file share cleanup initiative has been an outstanding experience from the start,” said Brandy Churillo, Director of Information Governance at Black Stone Minerals. “The initiative has already delivered meaningful value to our organization by improving visibility into our file share environment, reducing risk exposure, and helping position us for stronger information governance practices moving forward. I would highly recommend Pepper Energy Partners to any organization seeking a knowledgeable, trustworthy, and highly capable partner for data cleanup, information governance, file share remediation, or broader information management initiatives.”
As energy companies increase investment in AI and advanced analytics, the need for clean, classified, and trusted data has never been greater. Iron Horse positions organizations to move forward with confidence, transforming fragmented data environments into structured, value-generating assets.
For more information about The Iron Horse Assessment, visit: https://pepperep.com/iron-horse-assessment/
