What Are Mineral Rights Worth?

There is no single Permian Basin number, because the basin is not one thing. Midland and Delaware pricing runs on different curves, and a real range only shows up once your documents and county are on the table.

Every owner who calls us has already seen a number somewhere, usually a mailer offering a flat per-acre figure that ignores which sub-basin the acreage sits in. That number is a marketing hook, not an analysis. This guide walks through what an acquisitions desk actually weighs when it prices a Permian interest, and why the same net mineral acreage can land at meaningfully different levels in Martin County than it does forty miles away in Reeves County.

Midland Basin versus Delaware Basin, priced differently

The Permian Basin splits into two working plays separated by the Central Basin Platform, and pricing logic differs between them. The Midland side, running through Midland, Martin, Howard, Glasscock, and Reagan counties, is Wolfcamp and Spraberry country: shallower, more predictable well economics, and a long operating history that gives underwriting real comparables to work from. The Delaware side, across Reeves, Loving, Culberson, Ward, and Winkler counties, stacks the Wolfcamp under Bone Spring and Avalon benches, deeper and more expensive to drill, with higher-rate but steeper-declining wells. Delaware acreage in an active stacked-pay unit can price higher on a per-acre basis than comparable Midland acreage, but it can also swing harder on commodity moves because well economics there lean more on gas and NGL pricing alongside oil.

A number quoted without naming which basin, and ideally which county, your acreage sits in should be treated as a placeholder, not an offer.

Producing interests: the decline curve is the model

For an interest already receiving royalty checks, valuation starts with production history pulled from Railroad Commission of Texas records, not a guess. We model where the well or unit sits on its decline curve, since a well six months into production behaves very differently than one eight years in. Early-life Permian horizontal wells decline steeply in year one, then flatten into a longer tail, so an interest tied to a recently completed well and one tied to a mature well of the same size can price very differently even with identical current royalty checks.

Operator identity matters too. Acreage held by Diamondback, Pioneer-legacy operations now under ExxonMobil, Coterra, Permian Resources, or another active operator with a visible rig count nearby generally supports a stronger valuation than acreage under an operator with no recent permits filed, because future drilling upside gets priced alongside current cash flow.

Non-producing acreage: no cash flow yet, priced on the offset story

Undeveloped mineral acreage has no decline curve to model, so the valuation question becomes: how likely is this acreage to get drilled, and how soon. That is read off offset permitting activity, recent spacing unit filings, comparable lease bonuses paid nearby, and where the tract sits relative to an operator's current development pattern. Acreage inside an active operator's contiguous unit with permits filed within the last year prices meaningfully higher than acreage in a similar county with no nearby activity, even though neither has produced a barrel.

Your net mineral acres and decimal interest, not the surface acreage

Value is calculated against your net mineral acres times your decimal interest in the producing or permitted unit, not the surface acreage on the original deed. A quarter interest in 320 mineral acres held by four heirs is not the same as owning the whole 320 outright, and any preliminary estimate has to net that down correctly. This is where deed and division order review earns its keep: we confirm the decimal that actually applies before quoting anything firm.

We never state a fixed dollar-per-acre figure as a promise here. Any range we discuss is hedged, tied to recent comparable activity in your specific county, and treated as preliminary until documents are reviewed.

What moves a number up or down

Up: recent nearby permits or a rig on the offset, an active operator with a track record of timely development, a clean deed with no title gap, and current oil pricing supporting new drilling economics. Down: a stale or inactive operator, held-by-production acreage with no drilling in years, a fractional interest with title complications, or acreage positioned on the flank of a play rather than its productive core. We walk through your specific situation rather than applying a blanket county average, because two tracts a mile apart can carry very different pictures depending on which unit they fall inside.