Sell Mineral Rights in Alabama

Most of what crosses our desk out of Alabama is coalbed methane out of the Black Warrior basin, a play that has been dewatering and producing for three decades now, which means the packages we see are mature and the decline curves are well documented.

We buy coalbed methane royalty interests and, less often, working interests tied to Black Warrior basin production in Tuscaloosa, Jefferson, Fayette, and Walker counties. This is not a new resource play where operators are still delineating acreage. It is an old field with wells that have been on the books since the 1980s and 1990s, and that changes how we underwrite it.

A CBM royalty check today is mostly a function of a well's current gas rate and the price strip, not the promise of a new completion next door. So before we quote anything, we pull the well history ourselves, run the decline, and tell you what we actually see rather than what a package looks like on paper.

Why coalbed methane underwrites differently

CBM wells dewater a coal seam before gas flow ramps up, then decline on a curve that is gentler than a typical shale well but starts from a lower peak. A well that has been online since the Clinton-era boom in Black Warrior is likely well past its dewatering phase and sitting on a long, flat tail. That tail is exactly what we're pricing when we look at an Alabama package, and it is why we ask for twelve to twenty-four months of check stubs rather than a single month's number.

We also look at whether the operator has been consolidating gathering infrastructure in the area, since Black Warrior has seen several changes of operator over the years and a switch can show up as a gap or a restatement on your division order before it shows up as new drilling.

What a Black Warrior package usually looks like

A lot of the interests we're offered here trace back to coal and gas severances from the 1970s and 1980s, when the same landowner sold the coal seam gas rights separately from the surface, sometimes to a different company than the one that later drilled the wells. That severance history means title work in Alabama frequently runs through the probate court records in the county of record more than the courthouse deed room alone, and heirs who inherited a fractional interest often don't have a clean copy of the original severance deed.

We're comfortable working through that. If your interest passed through two or three generations of a family without a formal probate, we'll tell you upfront what documentation we need and help identify what's missing before we get near a closing date, rather than surprising you with a title objection after we've already made an offer.

Our process on an Alabama offer

We start from your division order or a recent check stub, identify the well or unit, and pull production history from state records before we ever put a number in front of you. If the well is still on a healthy decline and the operator's payment history is consistent, that's a very different conversation than a well that's been shut in for six months with no explanation on your statement.

Because Black Warrior is a mature play with modest well counts compared to the newer shale basins, our checks here tend to be sized to match: smaller packages, but underwritten with the same discipline we'd apply to a much larger Permian interest. We'd rather quote a number we can actually close at than chase volume with a package we haven't verified.

Where we're conservative in this state

We're candid that Alabama isn't a state where we compete aggressively on price the way we might in an active Permian county, because there's no new drilling catalyst pushing values up. What we can offer is a fast, honest read on a legacy interest that's been sitting in a family for a generation and a clean path to converting it to cash without a six-month probate fight first.