Bakken Mineral Rights

The Bakken boom checks from 2012 are long gone, but the ground underneath is still some of the best stacked pay in the country, and that's what we're pricing.

Everybody remembers the Bakken as the play that turned Williston into a boomtown overnight. What gets missed is that the geology never stopped being good — operators are still drilling long laterals through the Bakken and Three Forks benches across McKenzie, Mountrail, Williams, and Dunn counties, and the Elm Coulee field across the state line in Richland County, Montana. We buy in all of it.

What's changed since the boom years is who owns the minerals. A lot of the original owners who signed leases in 2008 through 2012 have since passed the interest to heirs, split it in a divorce, or moved it into a trust nobody's updated. We deal with that inherited-ownership tangle constantly, and it doesn't slow us down the way it does a lot of buyers.

Where we're actively buying

Our priority acreage is anywhere with active Three Forks development stacked under an existing Bakken bench, since that's where operators are running most of their current rigs — think the core of McKenzie and Mountrail counties. We also like units where an operator has recently refracked an older Bakken well, because that tells us they see more life in the reservoir than the original completion captured.

We're less aggressive, but still buying, in the flank areas toward the edges of the play where wells thin out and initial rates run lower. Those interests price on a more conservative multiple, but they still trade.

Where we pass, and the honest number behind it

Some Bakken acreage got leased and drilled once in the boom, produced hard for three or four years, and has been sitting on stripper-well volumes ever since with no re-completion planned. That's dead-play acreage in practical terms even though it's technically still producing. We'll still bid on it, but it's a salvage number — usually pricing off current trailing production with a heavy discount for the lack of any offset activity, rather than off type-curve upside.

If you've seen a neighbor's fresh Three Forks unit get a strong offer and you're comparing that to a salvage bid on a tired stripper well, the numbers won't match, and we'd rather explain the gap than have you feel lowballed.

How we underwrite Bakken-specific issues

Gas capture and flaring penalties are a real Bakken quirk. North Dakota has capture requirements that can reduce what an operator pays out on the gas stream if a well isn't connected to gathering infrastructure yet, which shows up as a smaller check than the oil production alone would suggest. We check gas capture percentage on your well before pricing.

We also weight stacked-pay upside carefully: a unit with only the Bakken bench developed and Three Forks still untouched has real future value, and we price that differently than a unit where both benches are already drilled out. It's part of why two units that look similar on paper get different offers from us.

Heir and pooled-unit ownership

Bakken mineral title is notoriously fractured — original quarter-section owners, oil and gas leases signed under boom-year pressure, and now a second generation of heirs who often don't agree on whether to sell. We're used to buying a single heir's fractional share without requiring the whole family to act together, and we can work through North Dakota and Montana probate requirements without it dragging out for months.

Pooled spacing units are standard here, so your interest is almost always tied to a unit order rather than a single well. We pull the unit order and current well list before pricing, since a unit with three producing wells is worth more than one with a single marginal well.