Sell Mineral Rights in North Dakota

Your North Dakota royalty statement tells a more precise story than most owners realize, and it's the first thing we ask for.

The Bakken and underlying Three Forks formation across McKenzie, Mountrail, Williams, and Dunn counties are as good as it gets for horizontal oil development in the Lower 48, and the operators running there, Continental Resources, EOG, Hess, Whiting among them, have drilled these spacing units aggressively enough that most owners in the core have real production history to work from. That's a different starting point than a lot of states we quote, where we’re estimating off nearby permits instead of actual check stubs.

What varies enormously, even within the core, is where a given well sits in its production life. A Bakken well's decline curve is steep in year one and two, then flattens into a long, shallow tail that can run for decades. Two owners with the same acreage size can have very different interests depending on whether their well was drilled last year or ten years ago, and we price to that specifically.

Reading your NDIC well file and check stub together

North Dakota's Industrial Commission keeps public well files with spud dates, completion reports, and production history by well, searchable by API number, which we cross-reference against your check stub before we quote anything. If your check stub shows a well that's three years past first production and already down sixty or seventy percent from its peak, that's a normal Bakken decline curve, not a red flag, and it prices differently than a well still in its first eighteen months.

We also check whether your interest sits in a unit with one well or several, since infill drilling on tighter spacing has added wells to a lot of older units over the past several years. An additional wellbore on your unit changes your cash flow, and we want that reflected before we put a number in front of you.

Core Bakken vs. the basin's edges

McKenzie and Mountrail counties sit in the thickest, most consistently productive part of the play; Divide, Burke, and the eastern fringe counties see thinner, more variable results. That doesn't mean edge acreage is worthless, particularly with modern completion techniques pulling more out of marginal rock than a decade ago, but it does mean we don't apply a McKenzie County multiple to a Divide County tract just because both sit on the same geologic trend.

Non-producing acreage in an actively drilled state

Because North Dakota is drilled so heavily, non-producing acreage here is less common than in a lot of states we work in, but it exists, usually where a spacing unit hasn't been developed yet or where a small fractional interest was carved out of a larger unit and never separately accounted for. Non-producing North Dakota acreage in an active township still draws real buyer interest, priced off nearby well performance and current permitting rather than production history that doesn't exist yet for your specific tract.

If your family's interest has sat non-producing for years in a county with heavy surrounding activity, that's worth a serious look, since it often means development simply hasn't reached your unit yet rather than that the rock underneath it is poor.

Title and probate in heirship-heavy counties

A lot of Bakken-area mineral ownership traces back to homestead-era family land, and it's routine to find interests split among a dozen heirs after two or three generations without a formal partition. County recorder's offices across the Bakken counties have handled enough of this that the process is well understood, but it still takes real paperwork: probate records, an accurate legal description matched to your division order, and confirmation of exactly which fractional share you hold. We can quote your share directly once that's sorted, and we’ll tell you upfront if we see a title issue that needs cleaning up before we can close.