SCOOP & STACK Mineral Rights

SCOOP and STACK get talked about together so often that owners assume they are the same play, and separating them correctly is usually the first thing our review has to do.

SCOOP, the South Central Oklahoma Oil Province, and STACK, the Sooner Trend Anadarko Canadian Kingfisher play, are two distinct horizontal plays in central Oklahoma that both target the Woodford and Meramec formations but sit in different counties with different operator footprints. SCOOP runs through Grady, Stephens, Garvin, and McClain counties. STACK sits mostly in Kingfisher, Blaine, Canadian, and Major counties to the north.

Both plays saw heavy horizontal drilling activity in the 2014 to 2019 window, with Continental Resources as one of the most consistent operators across both areas, and both have since settled into a slower, more selective development pace than their early boom years. Our underwriting reflects that maturity, we are not modeling these as growth plays the way we might model an emerging bench in the Permian.

Woodford versus Meramec, and why the target zone matters

The Woodford is the deeper, more consistently productive shale target across both SCOOP and STACK, while the Meramec, which sits shallower in the STACK area specifically, has had more variable results depending on where in the play an operator drills. We check which formation a tract's wells actually targeted before assuming a single decline curve applies, since a Woodford well and a Meramec well on adjacent leases can behave quite differently.

This distinction also affects how much remaining inventory we think a tract carries. Woodford spacing units in the SCOOP core have generally seen more consistent infill development than some of the more experimental Meramec spacing on the STACK's edges.

Why development pace slowed after the early boom

Both plays drew a wave of capital in the mid-2010s that outran what the rock could support at scale, and several operators pulled back or restructured after results in some spacing units came in below expectations. That history matters to our underwriting because it means we look closely at whether an operator is still actively permitting in a specific unit today, rather than assuming activity from 2016 or 2017 tells us much about what happens next.

Where we do see continued development, particularly in the SCOOP core counties, the packages can still underwrite well. Where a tract sits in one of the areas that saw an early well or two and then went quiet, we treat it more like a mature, PDP-weighted asset than an active-development one.

What we ask for before quoting

We want the division order, a recent check stub, and if the owner has it, any correspondence from the operator about additional permitted locations on the unit. Continental and the other operators active in this play generally keep owners reasonably informed, so a lot of owners already have more of this documentation than they realize.

Title in this part of Oklahoma tends to be cleaner than in some other legacy basins, since a lot of the leasing here happened more recently and under more standardized modern lease forms, which is one reason SCOOP and STACK packages often move faster through our process than older basins do.

Springer sands and other secondary zones we watch for

Beneath the primary Woodford and Meramec targets, some SCOOP-area operators have also tested the Springer sandstone interval, and a handful of tracts carry production or permits from that secondary zone alongside the shale wells more commonly associated with the play. We check whether a tract's unit has any Springer history before assuming the Woodford or Meramec is the whole story, since an owner's division order does not always spell out which formation a given well actually targets.

Where a Springer well exists on or near a tract, we treat it as additional data supporting the unit's overall activity level rather than a separate valuation exercise, since the same operators tend to be active across multiple zones in the same general area.