The Cedar Creek Anticline is a long, narrow fold along the southwestern edge of the Williston Basin, running northwest to southeast across Fallon, Wibaux, Dawson, and Prairie counties in eastern Montana and continuing into southwestern North Dakota. Shallow gas was found on the structure in 1913 and oil followed in 1936, which makes it one of the oldest sustained producing trends in the northern Rockies. Cabin Creek, Pennel, and Pine are the principal fields, and they have been produced with pressure support for decades rather than with new drilling. This is a carbonate waterflood and enhanced-recovery province, not a shale play, and the value in it is longevity. We buy mineral rights, royalty interests, NPRI, and ORRI across the Cedar Creek Anticline.
Approximate location of the Cedar Creek Anticline shown in tan
Basin-level activity chart not yet available for the Cedar Creek Anticline. For current activity, see our rig count dashboard and the state production pages linked above.
The anticline is a basement-involved fold on the southwestern flank of the Williston Basin, and its reservoirs are Paleozoic carbonates rather than sandstones. The Ordovician Red River carries much of the production, with additional pay in Silurian and Devonian carbonate intervals and in shallower Mississippian rocks. Porosity in these units is dolomitic and often vuggy, which is what lets old wells keep producing at low but steady rates. Trapping combines structural closure along the crest of the fold with truncation against overlying unconformities, so field outlines follow the structure closely. The Bakken and Three Forks that define the modern Williston lie in the deeper part of the basin to the northeast; the production on the anticline is an older, separate, conventional system with its own economics.
The core of the anticline has been held by one large operator at a time for many years. ConocoPhillips held the Cedar Creek Anticline fields until 2013, when Denbury Resources bought them for about 1.05 billion dollars; the anticline became Denbury's largest producing property, accounting for roughly 23 percent of its production in 2021. ExxonMobil completed its acquisition of Denbury in November 2023 and holds the position now. Denbury built its business around carbon-dioxide enhanced oil recovery, and that thesis is the reason capital has stayed pointed at a trend producing since the 1930s. A handful of smaller independents operate wells around the edges of the trend.
Cedar Creek Anticline values rest on the stability of pressure-supported production and on the operator's willingness to keep spending on it. The first questions are whether the tract lies inside a unit, what its participation factor is, what the unit is producing now, and how that number has moved over the last several years. Enhanced recovery is the main source of upside, because a successful flood can add recoverable barrels to a reservoir that has already been produced for decades; it is also a reason values here are tied closely to one operator's capital plans. Montana and North Dakota tax production differently, crude sold out of eastern Montana carries a transport differential, and both show up in what an interest actually nets.
Enhanced recovery means the operator injects something — water, or carbon dioxide — to push additional oil toward producing wells after primary depletion. For a royalty owner the effect is usually longer field life and a flatter decline than the reservoir would give on its own. The cost of injection is an operating expense the working-interest owners carry, and a royalty is normally free of those production costs, though your lease language still governs which post-production deductions are allowed. The trade-off is timing: floods take capital and time to respond, and the barrels arrive later. That is one reason some owners prefer a lump sum now to a slow recovery curve.
Most of the anticline is unitized, which means the tracts over a reservoir are operated as a single property so injection can be managed across the whole structure. Production from the unit is allocated to each tract by its participation factor, a number set when the unit was formed and based on acreage, productive interval, and historical performance. You are paid on your share of unit production regardless of where the wells physically sit. That participation factor is one of the first things we ask for, because two tracts of the same size in the same unit can be worth very different amounts depending on how they were weighted.
Fee minerals are recorded in the county clerk and recorder's office and pass by deed, will, or probate like any other real property interest, and in Fallon, Wibaux, Dawson, and Prairie counties that is what most mineral ownership looks like. Trust and allotted interests are different: title is held by the United States for tribes or individual allottees, leasing and revenue are administered through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the records live with the agency rather than the county. Those interests are not conveyed like fee minerals and fall outside what we purchase. The Fort Peck Reservation lies well north of the anticline, so most interests in this trend are fee.