Permian Basin Mineral Rights
The Permian is where our desk spends the most time, and also where we say no the most, because stacked-pay counties hide a lot of variance between a Wolfcamp A unit and a shallow legacy Clearfork well two sections over.
West Texas and southeast New Mexico carry more active rigs than any other play in the country, which cuts both ways for a mineral owner. There is real operator competition for acreage, but there is also a wide spread between a package sitting under current development and one that was drilled once in the 1980s and forgotten. Our first pass on any Permian tract is figuring out which of those two situations we are actually looking at.
The basin splits into the Midland side and the Delaware side, and we treat them differently on the desk. Midland is the shallower shelf play, mostly Spraberry and Wolfcamp with some legacy Clearfork and Dean production layered under it. Delaware is deeper and higher pressure, with Bone Spring and Wolfcamp benches stacked several thousand feet thick in Reeves, Loving, Ward, and Culberson counties on the Texas side, and Lea and Eddy on the New Mexico side.
How we read bench inventory before we quote anything
A single Permian section can carry five or six landable zones stacked on top of each other, and not all of them are being developed at the same pace. Before we put a number in front of an owner we pull the horizontal permits and completions against the spacing unit the mineral tract sits in, because a tract under an active Wolfcamp A/B co-development program reads very differently from one where only the Spraberry has ever been drilled.
We also check whether the operator has filed for down-spacing or infill locations, since that tells us how much of the remaining bench inventory is likely to get drilled in a horizon we care about versus sitting behind older vertical spacing that may never get revisited. A lot of the value argument in the Permian comes down to that inventory count, not only the last twelve months of royalty checks.
Ownership fragmentation on old West Texas ranches
Much of the surface in Midland, Martin, Howard, Reagan, and Upton counties has been in the same ranching families for generations, and the mineral estate under it has usually been split by inheritance many times over. It is common for us to be underwriting a fractional interest that traces back through five or six heirs, each holding a sliver of the original grant, and each with a different appetite for selling.
That fragmentation is not a problem for the desk, it is just a fact we build into the timeline. Clean title with a probated chain of ownership closes fast. A tract still sitting in an unprobated estate, or split among heirs who disagree, takes longer and usually needs an attorney involved before we can move.
Where a package gets hard to close
The friction points we see most in the Permian are non-participating royalty interests carved out decades ago with vague habendum language, old leases that never properly terminated on paper even though the well went dry, and pooled units where the owner's interest was never correctly allocated after a resurvey. Any of those can add weeks to a closing.
The packages that move fastest are producing interests with a clean division order history, a current operator statement, and an owner who can show us the original deed or a probate decree without us having to chase the county clerk's office ourselves.
Reading the operator's rig allocation across their own acreage position
A large public operator active in the Permian typically holds acreage across dozens of spacing units, and rig allocation within that footprint shifts from quarter to quarter based on well results, service costs, and corporate capital budgets rather than staying fixed on any one section. We look at where an operator has actually run rigs over the last several quarters, not merely where they hold acreage, since a tract sitting in a unit an operator has quietly deprioritized behaves differently than one inside their current core development area regardless of what the original lease implied.
Questions Owners Ask the Acquisition Desk
Does the Midland side or the Delaware side get better underwriting terms?
Neither side is automatically better. Delaware packages tend to carry more stacked-pay upside because of the depth and bench count, but Midland packages often have longer production histories we can model against, so it comes down to the specific spacing unit, not which side of the basin it sits on.
What if my interest has never had a horizontal well drilled on it?
We still look at it, but we weight it against nearby permits and completions rather than actual royalty history. Undeveloped acreage in an active spacing unit can still be worth reviewing, it is just a different kind of underwriting than a producing tract.
Do you buy small fractional interests, like a 1/64th royalty?
Yes, though small fractional interests take a bit more documentation work on our end to confirm the exact decimal against the division order, and that can affect how quickly we can move relative to a larger, cleaner interest.
How much does the operator matter to your review?
It matters more than most owners expect. An operator with a multi-year permitted inventory in that specific spacing unit reads very differently to us than one that has largely moved capital elsewhere, even if both wells are currently producing.
Want a range built from your statements, acreage, lease, activity, and ownership records?
Send the county and state, owner name, operator or payor, recent statement, deed reference, lease, division order, probate record, or written offer you have.