Sell Mineral Rights in Kansas

Two very different Kansas plays land on our desk under one state heading: the Mississippian lime oil trend across the south-central counties, and the long-running Hugoton gas field out west.

Mississippian lime activity picked up meaningfully in the 2010s across counties like Barber, Harper, and Comanche, and while drilling has slowed since its peak, the wells drilled during that window are still relatively young compared to a lot of Kansas production, so we can often underwrite off a decent stretch of real production history.

The Hugoton field in the far southwest is a different story entirely, one of the largest and oldest natural gas fields in the country, with production going back to the 1920s. A Hugoton royalty is a long, well-documented decline curve, and we treat it that way rather than trying to force it into a shale-style valuation framework.

Mississippian lime: reading a mid-cycle play

Because Mississippian lime drilling ramped and then slowed within a fairly compressed window, a lot of the interests we see here are tied to wells with ten to fifteen years of history, long enough to see a real decline pattern but not so long that we're guessing at a well's remaining life from a handful of data points. We ask for the full check history we can get, since spacing and unit configuration varied more in this play than in a more uniformly developed basin.

Water handling costs matter more in Mississippian lime than in a lot of other Kansas production, since these wells often produce meaningful water alongside oil, and operator cost discipline on that front affects how long a well stays economic to keep running.

Hugoton: pricing a century-long tail

Hugoton field wells have some of the longest, most predictable decline behavior of any conventional gas field in the country, which actually makes them easier to underwrite in some respects, since there's less uncertainty about how the well behaves going forward. The tradeoff is that individual well rates are modest, so a Hugoton royalty check tends to be small and steady rather than large.

Because so much of Hugoton production has been consolidated under a handful of long-time operators, payment history here is usually clean and well documented, and we can move through underwriting quickly once we see the statement.

Working Kansas title records

Kansas title generally runs through the register of deeds in the county of record, and we pull those records ourselves rather than asking you to chase them down. Where we see delays, it's usually a fractional interest that's passed through multiple generations without formal probate, which is common enough in rural Kansas counties that we have a standard process for working through it.

We'll tell you plainly if your particular county's records are digitized or if the search will require an in-person pull, since that affects our timeline estimate.

How we price across the two plays

A Mississippian lime interest gets priced against a still-developing decline curve with some uncertainty baked in. A Hugoton interest gets priced against a very well-known, very long tail with less uncertainty but also less upside. We're clear about which category your interest falls into before we ever give you a number.

Why unit configuration matters more in the Mississippian lime

Spacing and unit boundaries in the Mississippian lime were not always drawn as consistently as in a more recently developed basin, since the play moved through several rounds of operator experimentation on well spacing before settling into current practice. We check which unit configuration actually applies to a given tract, since two adjacent sections can carry meaningfully different production allocations depending on when and how each unit was formed, and an older division order does not always reflect the current configuration accurately.

Kansas Corporation Commission unitization orders worth pulling

Kansas has its own history of state-ordered unitization on some Hugoton and Mississippian lime fields, consolidating what were originally separate leases into a single field-wide or unit-wide allocation formula, and confirming a tract's participation percentage under that order matters more than looking at the original lease alone. We pull the Kansas Corporation Commission's order for the relevant field whenever one exists, since it typically controls how production is actually allocated today regardless of what an older individual lease might otherwise suggest.