Permian Basin Mineral Rights

Everyone says Permian Basin, but the first real question is Midland or Delaware, because that answer changes almost everything about your interest.

The Permian is the most productive oil basin in the country, spanning roughly 250 miles across West Texas and southeast New Mexico, and it's really two distinct sub-basins, the Midland to the east and the Delaware to the west, separated by the Central Basin Platform. We’ve worked both sides, and treating them as one uniform play is where a lot of buyers get sloppy with their offers.

Whichever sub-basin your minerals fall in, and often the specific county matters just as much, the Permian generally rewards owners who sell with current, well-researched activity data rather than a generic basin-wide number pulled off a map.

Two Sub-Basins, Two Different Stories

The Midland Basin is shallower, has nearly a century of production history layered from vertical wells through modern horizontals, and skews oil-heavy. The Delaware is deeper, has more aggressively stacked pay across multiple Bone Spring and Wolfcamp intervals, and has seen some of the most active recent drilling in the entire country. Both are technically the Permian. Neither should be priced the same way.

If you're not sure which side your minerals fall on, your county tells us immediately, and it's the first thing we confirm before quoting anything.

Multi-Pay Stacking Drives Long-Term Value

What sets the Permian apart from most other basins is the sheer number of productive zones stacked on top of each other, Spraberry, Wolfcamp, Bone Spring, Avalon, and deeper targets depending on location. A single spacing unit can support many wellbores landed at different depths over years or decades of development, which means Permian minerals often carry more long-term development potential than a single-zone basin elsewhere.

Infrastructure Has Caught Up With Production

Years of heavy investment in pipeline, gathering, and processing infrastructure across the Permian have reduced the takeaway bottlenecks that plagued the basin in its fastest growth years. That means producing wells here are generally able to sell most of what they produce without the curtailment issues that show up in newer or less-developed basins, which supports more predictable royalty payment.

Activity Levels Vary Sharply by County

Reeves and Loving County in the Delaware, or Midland and Martin County on the Midland side, see very different rig counts than counties further from the core. We pull current Texas Railroad Commission and New Mexico Oil Conservation Division permit data by county before making any offer, because a Permian-wide average tells you almost nothing useful about your specific tract.

Decades of Layered Ownership History

Because so much of the Permian has been under lease and production since the mid-20th century, mineral ownership records here often carry a lot of accumulated history, prior sales, partial assignments, probate transfers, and old unitization orders that all affect the current chain of title. That depth of history is manageable, we work through Permian title regularly, but it does mean a clean, fast closing depends on getting the paperwork request right the first time.

If you have any prior division orders, old lease copies, or probate documents from a parent's or grandparent's estate, gathering those before we start speeds up the whole process considerably.