Antrim Shale Mineral Rights

Nobody's getting rich off an Antrim well, and we're not going to tell you otherwise, but that doesn't mean your interest is worthless.

The Antrim Shale is a different animal than the shale plays everybody talks about. It's a shallow, biogenic gas play across the northern half of Michigan's Lower Peninsula — Otsego, Antrim, Montmorency, Grand Traverse, and the counties around them — and it was mostly drilled out in the 1990s and early 2000s. There's very little new drilling now. What's left is a large population of older wells still producing modest, steady gas volumes, and a lot of small fractional mineral interests attached to them.

We buy those interests specifically because most buyers won't touch anything this small or this mature. If you've got a mineral interest tied to an Antrim well drilled twenty-five years ago, paying a check that ranges from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars a month, you're exactly who we're set up to work with.

Why we still buy in a basin nobody's drilling

Most institutional mineral buyers want new drilling, growing production, and big check sizes. Antrim has none of that anymore. But the wells that are still online tend to decline slowly — this play was never about big initial rates, it was about long, flat production off a large gas-in-place resource — so the income stream, while small, is often more predictable than a shale well three years off its peak.

We buy these interests to hold for the cash flow, not to flip on a lease bonus. That's a different business model than a Permian buyer chasing the next horizontal permit, and it's why we can offer real money for a $60-a-month royalty check when other buyers won't return your call.

The honest math on legacy production

There's no dead-play discount conversation to have here in the way there is in a shale basin, because Antrim was never a growth play to begin with — it's been a mature, declining asset for two decades. What we look at is your trailing production history: how flat or how steep the decline has been over the last several years, and whether the well operator has kept it running consistently or let it go on and off.

A well with a long, stable production record typically prices at a higher multiple of trailing income than one with gaps, shut-ins, or an operator that's clearly deferring maintenance. We pull the state production records for your well before we give you a number, so the offer is grounded in the actual history, not a guess.

How our underwriting handles Antrim's quirks

Antrim gas often comes up with produced water, and some wells need artificial lift or dewatering to keep flowing, which affects operating costs and, downstream, your net royalty. We factor lifting cost trends into our offer because a well that's getting more expensive to operate is one where the operator's appetite to keep it running can change.

Michigan severance tax and the specifics of older Michigan leases — a lot of them predate modern royalty clauses — also shape what actually lands in your pocket. We read the original lease or the division order line by line rather than assuming a standard one-eighth or one-fifth royalty.

Ownership realities we run into

A huge share of Antrim mineral owners inherited a small interest from a parent or grandparent who owned a farm in northern Michigan decades ago and leased the minerals almost as an afterthought. Many of these owners have never met the operator, don't know which well their interest is attached to, and get a check that's more paperwork than money.

If that's you, we can usually track down your well and production history from the check stub or division order number alone, walk you through what it's actually worth, and close without you needing to drive up to the county seat or deal with a probate attorney if the estate's already settled.