Midland Basin Mineral Rights

The Midland Basin was where the tract desk cut its teeth running production, and it's still the play where it feel most confident putting a number on paper fast.

The Midland Basin is the eastern shelf of the greater Permian, and it's the more mature, more densely drilled half of the two. If you own minerals here, there's a decent chance a well has already been drilled on or near your section, which gives the tract desk actual production history to work from instead of a projection built entirely off offset analogs.

The core counties the tract desk watch closest are Midland, Martin, Howard, Glasscock, and Reagan, with Upton and Dawson picking up development as operators extend the play's edges. Depth here runs shallower than the Delaware side, generally eight to eleven thousand feet to the Wolfcamp, which keeps drilling costs more manageable and has historically supported a wider range of operators, from majors down to smaller private companies working single leases.

Wolfcamp and Spraberry, stacked but uneven

The Midland Basin's value comes from the Spraberry and Wolfcamp intervals stacked on top of each other, with the Wolfcamp further broken into A, B, C, and sometimes D benches. Not every bench is commercial on every section, and that's the first thing the tract desk checks when it gets a call about Midland minerals. A tract can sit in a county with strong headline activity while the specific section only has one productive bench actually being drilled.

The tract desk pulls the completion reports on any wells already producing near the tract to see which zones the operator targeted and how the well performed against the type curve for that part of the county. A strong early-time rate that's holding up on the decline curve tells the tract desk more than any acreage map.

How operator identity changes the tract desk's number

Martin and Midland counties have some of the densest multi-well pad development in the entire basin, run by operators with large, contiguous positions and multi-year permit inventories. Minerals under that kind of program tend to see steadier development because the operator has both the acreage and the capital to keep drilling through commodity cycles.

Further out toward Reagan, Upton, or the Glasscock county lines, you'll sometimes find acreage held by a smaller operator drilling opportunistically, a well or two a year to hold the lease. That's fine for an owner who already has production, but it changes how the tract desk underwrites undeveloped or partially held sections, since the development timeline is less predictable.

What actually moves the number on your specific tract

Net royalty acres matter, obviously, but so does whether your minerals sit under a currently producing unit, a permitted-but-undrilled unit, or open acreage with no permit filed. Each of those is a different asset with a different risk profile, and the tract desk prices them differently rather than applying one basin-wide multiple.

The tract desk also checks whether there's an active lease on the property and what royalty rate it carries. An older lease at a lower royalty fraction changes the math on any future production compared to a newer lease negotiated at current market terms, so that number belongs in the conversation from the start.

Where the tract desk has seen owners underestimate their position

It's common for a Midland Basin owner to know they have production but not know exactly how many net royalty acres they hold or how that number was calculated on the current division order. Older interests, especially ones split across siblings or cousins, sometimes carry decimal errors that never got corrected because nobody flagged them against the original deed.

Before the tract desk finalizes a number, it recheck the math directly against the underlying deed and any subsequent transfers, since a decimal that's off by even a small amount compounds meaningfully once it's applied across years of remaining production on an actively developing tract.