What Are Mineral Rights Worth?

Owners ask what their minerals are worth like there's a statewide price sheet. There isn't. There's a basin, and the basin does most of the talking.

Two owners can hold the same net mineral acres, same royalty fraction, same everything on paper, and get very different numbers if one sits in the Permian Basin and the other sits in a quieter corner of the Anadarko. We have priced tracts across most of the state's active plays, and basin position is the single biggest driver we have seen, more than county lines, more than acreage size alone.

Here's how value tends to run across the major Texas basins right now, and the factors that move a number up or down within any of them.

Permian Basin: Midland and Delaware

The Permian, running across West Texas counties like Midland, Martin, Reeves, and Loving, has carried the heaviest sustained drilling activity in the state for years. Multiple stacked pay zones mean a single tract can see wells drilled at several depths over time, which supports stronger valuations, particularly in the core of either the Midland or Delaware sub-basins.

Value inside the Permian still varies sharply between core acreage, where operators are actively permitting multi-well pads, and flank acreage further from the productive fairway, where activity thins out and pricing follows.

Eagle Ford: a maturing play with real remaining life

The Eagle Ford across South Texas counties like Karnes, DeWitt, and La Salle was the first major unconventional play in the state and is well into maturity now. Many wells here are further along their decline curves than newer Permian wells, which changes the math for producing tracts, but the play still sees active development, especially in gas-rich and condensate windows.

Undeveloped Eagle Ford acreage tends to price on where it sits relative to the oil, condensate, and dry gas windows that run roughly parallel across the trend, since each window behaves differently.

Haynesville: gas-driven, price-sensitive

In East Texas counties overlapping the Haynesville trend, value tracks natural gas prices and demand more directly than oil-weighted basins do. Activity has swung with gas pricing cycles, so tracts here can see sharper near-term value swings tied to how operators are responding to current gas markets and LNG export demand.

Owners in this basin should expect valuations to move with the gas price cycle more visibly than in an oil-dominant play.

Anadarko Basin and the Texas Panhandle

The Anadarko, including the Granite Wash and other formations across the Texas Panhandle, has seen slower, quieter activity in recent years compared to the Permian or Eagle Ford. That doesn't mean no value, it means valuations here lean more heavily on legacy production history and any recent, localized drilling rather than broad basin-wide momentum.

Owners here often hold interests tied to older wells with long, shallow decline curves, which price differently than a newer horizontal well still early in its production life.

What moves value inside any basin

Beyond basin position, a handful of factors shift value within any single play: how recently the well was drilled and how far along its decline curve it sits, whether the operator has a strong track record of completing wells efficiently in that specific formation, and whether your tract falls in a spacing unit that's fully developed or still has untapped bench potential.

None of these move value in isolation. A newer well in the core of an active basin, operated by a company with a strong local track record, in a unit with remaining undeveloped zones, stacks several positive factors at once. Take away any one of them and the number shifts accordingly.

Older and conventional plays

Plenty of Texas mineral owners hold interests in older conventional fields, or in the Barnett Shale gas play around Fort Worth, where drilling has slowed but production and royalty checks often continue for years. These interests still hold real value, priced against remaining reserves and the stability of a well past its steep early decline rather than against new-drilling potential.

Wherever your tract sits, the number always comes back to the same three questions: what's the production history or drilling likelihood, where does it sit relative to the active core of its basin, and what are nearby operators doing right now.