Sell Mineral Rights in Lea County, TX/NM

Lea County has two faces: the Northwest Shelf shallow production around Lovington and Hobbs, and the Delaware Basin horizontal push toward the Texas line near Jal and Eunice.

Lea County produces more oil than any other county in New Mexico, and it's not close. That's not a marketing line, it's just what the state's own production numbers show, and it means the mineral ownership here is some of the most fought-over in the Permian. Between Hobbs, Jal, Lovington, Eunice and Monument you've got shallow San Andres and Yeso production going back to the 1930s stacked underneath a modern Bone Spring and Wolfcamp horizontal program.

That layering is exactly why two neighbors with adjoining tracts can get wildly different offers. One might be sitting on a section held by a 1960s vertical well paying almost nothing, the other under an active spacing unit with three or four horizontal laterals. We price the actual wellbore or unit you're in, county averages don't mean much here.

The geology owners actually need to understand

Move west across Lea County from the Texas line and you cross from the Northwest Shelf onto the edge of the Delaware Basin proper. The shelf side, closer to Lovington and Tatum, produces from shallower San Andres and Yeso carbonate that's been on waterflood for decades in a lot of units. The basin side, toward Jal and the state line, is where the Bone Spring and Wolfcamp horizontal drilling has been concentrated for the last ten-plus years, with operators running multi-well pads on tight spacing.

If your family's minerals sit on the shelf side, don't assume you're missing out on the horizontal boom, plenty of shelf acreage still throws off steady, long-lived royalty income even without a new well. If you're on the basin side, your interest may be worth pursuing now specifically because of active permitting nearby.

What drives our offer

We start with your division order or check stubs and pull the well or unit history from the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division. From there we're looking at decline rate, how many wells are actually on your unit versus permitted but not drilled, and whether there's competing acreage nearby that suggests more activity is coming. A tract with two producing horizontals and a permit filed on the offset section prices differently than one lone vertical well past its economic life.

We also see a lot of Lea County owners who inherited a working or royalty interest from a relative who worked in the oilfield here, sometimes going back to the original Hobbs field discovery era. Those interests often carry old, informal record-keeping, and we're used to reconstructing the chain of title from courthouse records rather than requiring you to have every document already in hand.

Split estates and municipal overlap

Hobbs and Lovington have both grown enough that mineral tracts occasionally sit under developed or annexed land now, which raises surface-use questions the surface owner and mineral owner have to sort out separately from the sale. That doesn't stop a mineral sale, it's just something we flag early so there are no surprises at closing.

We also see a fair number of split estates where the surface was sold off generations ago but minerals stayed in the family. If that's your situation, your mineral interest is what we're buying, not the land, and the two are handled independently under New Mexico law.