Permian Basin Mineral Rights

The tract desk spent most of its career on the operating side of the Permian, and now it sit on the other end of the table pricing what owners are sitting on.

The Permian is really two basins wearing one name: the Midland shelf on the east side and the Delaware trough to the west, split by the Central Basin Platform. When someone tells the tract desk they own minerals in the Permian, its first question is which side of that platform, because it changes the whole underwriting conversation. Depth, pressure regime, and which formation is actually productive under the acreage all shift depending on which flank you're on.

What makes the Permian different from most of the plays the tract desk underwrites is stacked pay. A single section can carry commercial intervals in the Spraberry, the Wolfcamp A through D, the Bone Spring, and sometimes the Atoka or Strawn below that. That stacking is why Permian minerals often price higher than a single-zone play with an identical net royalty acre count, but it also makes lazy comparisons dangerous. An operator can hold a unit for one zone and never touch the others for a decade.

What the tract desk actually looks at before quoting a number

First thing the tract desk pulls is the drilling and permitting history on your specific section, going beyond the county-level averages. The tract desk wants to know who operates the offset units, whether they're a major with a multi-year development program or a smaller private operator that drills opportunistically. A Pioneer or Diamondback-style development schedule behaves very differently than a single operator working one rig across a large lease position.

Second, the tract desk checks whether you're already receiving royalty or whether this is leased-but-undrilled or entirely undeveloped acreage. Producing minerals with a decline curve the tract desk can chart are the easiest thing in the world to underwrite. Undeveloped Permian acreage in a hot county is a bet on future permitting, and the tract desk prices that as an option, not as a stream of income.

Third, spacing. Modern Permian units run tight, often four to twelve wells per section depending on the operator's current program and the target intervals. Tighter spacing generally means more total recoverable volume attributed to your acres over the life of the field, but it also front-loads a lot of the value into the first three to five years of production, which matters for how the tract desk discount it.

Midland side versus Delaware side, in plain terms

Midland Basin acreage tends to be shallower, less pressured, and cheaper to drill, which historically supported a lot of vertical and early horizontal activity before the basin fully converted to multi-well pad development. Counties like Midland, Martin, Howard, and Glasscock sit in the core, with Reagan and Upton picking up more activity as operators pushed the play's edges.

Delaware Basin acreage runs deeper and overpressured in the core of Reeves, Loving, Ward, and Culberson counties, which means bigger wells on average but higher drilling costs, so operator selectivity matters more. A Delaware unit held by a well-capitalized operator with a multi-year permit inventory prices differently than the same rock held by someone drilling one well a year to keep the lease alive.

Where the tract desk has seen owners leave money on the table

The most common mistake the tract desk sees is an owner comparing their offer to a number a neighbor mentioned without accounting for interval count, spacing density, or whether the neighbor's tract sits closer to the basin's structural sweet spot. Two tracts a mile apart in the Permian can carry meaningfully different underwriting because of small structural or thickness variations that only show up when you pull the actual well data.

The second mistake is selling undeveloped acreage in a county with active permitting without checking recent offset permits and rig activity first. If operators just filed permits within a mile of your section, that changes the near-term development timeline and, in the tract desk's underwriting, the price it is willing to put on it.