The Maverick Basin occupies the southwest corner of the South Texas oil patch, a Cretaceous depocenter running along the Rio Grande through Maverick, Zavala, and Dimmit counties and reaching northeast toward Bexar and Medina. It is the western end of the Eagle Ford trend, and the same rocks that made the central counties famous are present here, though they behave differently than they do in the core. Production long predates the shale era. Serious drilling in Maverick County began in the mid-1950s, the county had more than 300 producing wells by 1970, and fields such as Fitzpatrick, Wipff, and Burr were drilled in 1969 and 1970. We buy mineral rights, royalty interests, NPRI, and ORRI across the Maverick Basin.
Approximate location of the Maverick Basin shown in tan
Basin-level activity chart not yet available for the Maverick Basin. For current activity, see our rig count dashboard and the state production pages linked above.
The Maverick Basin is a Cretaceous structural and depositional low on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, at the western edge of the broader South Texas Cretaceous section. From the top down, the column runs through the Escondido and Olmos formations, into the Austin Chalk, then the Eagle Ford, and down to the Buda and Georgetown limestones. The Eagle Ford here lies at the shallow end of a trend the Railroad Commission describes as running roughly 4,000 to 12,000 feet across South Texas, and it thins and changes character eastward across the San Marcos Arch. The Olmos is a shallow, coal-bearing package; coal at Olmos and Dolchburg in Maverick County was mined commercially decades before the county produced oil. Austin Chalk and Buda production depends heavily on natural fracturing.
The Maverick Basin has never carried the stable operator roster that the core Eagle Ford counties do. Activity has come in waves: conventional drilling from the 1950s through the 1970s, a horizontal push into the Austin Chalk and shallow sands in the late 1980s and 1990s that revived older fields around Big Wells in Dimmit County, and an Eagle Ford leasing rush after 2008 whose capital largely moved east once results there proved stronger. What remains is a mixed base of independents running shallow oil and gas properties, operators holding acreage for optionality, and periodic re-entries into old wellbores. The northeastern counties, Bexar, Medina, and Frio, see a different set of operators than the Rio Grande counties. Your check stub here may have changed names several times.
Maverick Basin mineral values track what is actually producing beneath a tract rather than what the basin is theoretically capable of. Shallow oil and gas interests with steady low-rate production are valued on the remaining tail and on operating cost, since marginal wells in this part of Texas respond quickly to price. Where an Eagle Ford or Austin Chalk horizontal already holds the acreage, value depends on well vintage, the spacing already drilled, and whether the operator has remaining inventory nearby. Undeveloped deep rights carry real option value, and we price that option honestly, because this basin has seen leasing cycles that did not turn into drilling. Old leases with unusual pooling or depth language are common here and bear directly on value.
Not quite. The Eagle Ford is a rock formation that runs in a long arc across South Texas. The Maverick Basin is the structural basin at the western end of that arc. Minerals here often include Eagle Ford rights, but they also commonly include Austin Chalk, Olmos, Escondido, Buda, and Georgetown rights, several of which were produced long before anyone drilled a horizontal Eagle Ford well. When we value an interest in this basin we look at the whole column rather than the shale alone, because the older shallow production is frequently the part that is still paying a check today.
Results, mostly. The Eagle Ford is present across the whole trend, but the central and eastern counties delivered better wells at the depths and pressures operators were targeting in the first wave, so capital concentrated there. That makes western acreage later-cycle rather than worthless. Completion designs, well spacing, and gas price expectations have all shifted since 2010, and operators have revisited acreage before. If you own in Maverick, Zavala, or Dimmit counties, the honest framing is that you hold producing shallow rights plus an option on deeper development, and both parts deserve to be priced separately.
Yes, and there is no cost to finding out. A small, stable royalty from a long-life shallow well can be perfectly good income, and plenty of owners keep theirs. What we can give you is a cash number for it today plus a plain-language read on the title and production data, including whether the deeper rights under your tract were ever leased. Owners in the Maverick Basin often find the deep rights are the larger part of the value even when the current check is modest. You get that read from us whether or not you decide to sell.