Sell Mineral Rights in New Mexico

Lea County and San Juan County are both New Mexico, but they're not the same mineral market, and we’ve watched owners get confused by that more than once.

New Mexico runs two genuinely different oil and gas provinces, and which one your acreage sits in changes almost everything about how we’d value it. Lea and Eddy counties are the New Mexico half of the Delaware Basin, the most actively drilled corner of the Permian, with operators running multi-well pads and stacked-lateral development across Bone Spring and Wolfcamp benches. San Juan County, in the state's northwest corner, is an older gas basin, some of it conventional Mesaverde and Fruitland Coal production that's been on decline for years, with only sporadic newer activity.

We ask which county you're in before we say anything else about value, because a Delaware Basin quote and a San Juan Basin quote start from entirely different baselines. One is oil-driven and still expanding; the other is a mature gas basin where the story is mostly about how much decline has already happened.

Delaware Basin: stacked pay and pad-scale development

Lea and Eddy counties sit in one of the most heavily permitted parts of the entire Permian, where operators drill multiple benches, Wolfcamp, Bone Spring, sometimes Avalon, from a single pad targeting the same spacing unit. That density means a producing interest here often has more than one horizon contributing, and it also means non-producing acreage close to active pad activity can carry real interest from buyers even before a rig shows up on your specific section.

The tradeoff is that Delaware Basin decline curves on newer horizontal wells front-load production hard in the first eighteen to twenty-four months. A well six months into its life and a well six years into its life look very different on a check stub, and we price accordingly rather than applying one multiple across the whole basin.

San Juan Basin: legacy gas and coalbed methane

San Juan County's production history goes back much further than the Delaware Basin's current boom, with a lot of Fruitland Coal coalbed methane development from the 1990s and 2000s alongside older conventional Mesaverde gas wells. Most of that acreage is well into decline, and gas price swings hit San Juan Basin royalty checks harder than a Permian oil check because there's no oil revenue cushioning the number.

That doesn't make San Juan Basin minerals worthless, it makes them a different kind of asset: steadier, lower-decline production on older wells, valued more on current cash flow and remaining reserve life than on nearby drilling momentum, since new drilling in this basin is far less common than in the Delaware.

Producing vs. non-producing pricing in both basins

For producing New Mexico interests, we ask for your division order and the last several months of check stubs, whichever basin you're in, because that's the fastest way to see the actual decline trend rather than guess at it. For non-producing acreage, Delaware Basin tracts get priced against nearby permitting and recent lease activity, which moves often in Lea and Eddy counties; San Juan Basin non-producing acreage gets priced more conservatively, since new leasing activity there is comparatively rare.

New Mexico state trust land and federal BLM acreage border a lot of private mineral tracts in both basins, so it's worth double-checking that your interest is the private fee mineral estate and not something administered separately, since that changes who you're actually dealing with.

Clearing title before you sell

New Mexico mineral deeds and probate records are filed at the county clerk's office, and Lea and Eddy counties in particular have seen enough ownership churn from decades of leasing activity that it's common to find split interests, old unreleased leases, or an estate that never formally probated the mineral interest separately from the surface. None of that stops a sale, but knowing about it before we quote a number means the number we give you is one we can actually close on without surprises.