Basin Detail
The North Louisiana Salt Basin is the salt-influenced province underlying much of north Louisiana, lying between the Sabine Uplift to the west and the Monroe Uplift to the northeast. Jurassic Louann salt moved and withdrew at depth, and the structures it created hold most of the conventional fields in the region. Oil was discovered at Homer in 1921, and a second strike came that same year at Haynesville in northern Claiborne Parish, with the boom running through the 1930s. On the northeastern flank, the Delhi field spans Franklin, Madison, and Richland parishes and is produced under a carbon dioxide flood. Louisiana works by parish rather than county, which matters when you trace an old conveyance. We buy mineral rights, royalty interests, NPRI, and ORRI across the North Louisiana Salt Basin.
Approximate location of the North Louisiana Salt Basin shown in tan
Basin-level activity chart not yet available for the North Louisiana Salt Basin. For current activity, see our rig count dashboard and the state production pages linked above.
The province took its present shape from Jurassic Louann salt, which flowed and withdrew beneath the sedimentary section and produced the domes, pillows, and fault-line traps that most north Louisiana fields sit on. The deepest widely productive horizon is the Upper Jurassic Smackover, an oolitic and silty limestone that produces across Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and the eastern Gulf states. Above it, the Cotton Valley Group and then the Hosston, called the Travis Peak on the Texas side, supply the Lower Cretaceous clastic reservoirs that carry much of the region's gas. Shallower still, Tertiary Wilcox sands produce in parts of the province. The Jurassic Haynesville section sits within this same deep interval, which is one reason the naming causes so much confusion for owners.
Operatorship in north Louisiana splits by depth and by play. The shallow oil fields and long-standing floods are largely held by Louisiana and Texas independents that specialize in mature, low-rate properties, and many of those leases have changed operators several times since the 1930s. The Delhi field is a different animal: a unitized carbon dioxide flood across roughly 14,000 gross unitized acres, operated by Denbury Onshore, with Evolution Petroleum holding a substantial working interest plus overriding royalty and mineral interests. Deep Cotton Valley and Haynesville gas rights in the western parishes draw a larger, more familiar set of horizontal gas operators. A single tract can therefore have one operator shallow and an entirely different one thousands of feet below.
North Louisiana mineral values depend first on which interval produces beneath your tract and second on Louisiana's own rules of ownership. Shallow oil interests under waterflood or carbon dioxide flood are valued on remaining recovery and on the economics of the injection project, which can extend field life well past what primary production would have delivered. Deep gas rights are valued on horizontal well performance and gas price expectations, and they trade in a separate market. Louisiana also treats mineral rights as a servitude that can prescribe back to the landowner after ten years of nonuse, so confirming that an interest is still alive is part of every valuation here. Unit designations and old servitude chains are the routine title work.
No, and this is the most common mix-up in north Louisiana. The historic Haynesville oil field is a shallow field near the town of Haynesville in northern Claiborne Parish, found in 1921 during the same boom that opened Homer. The Haynesville Shale is an Upper Jurassic gas shale developed at roughly 10,500 to 13,000 feet with horizontal wells and hydraulic fracturing after 2008, and it borrowed the town name because its type location was a well drilled there. Different rocks, different depths, different products, different value. We keep a separate Haynesville page on this site for the shale play.
Louisiana does not treat severed minerals as an estate you own in perpetuity. Instead, a mineral servitude is a right to explore for and produce minerals from land owned by someone else, and as a general rule it prescribes, meaning it extinguishes, after ten years of nonuse, with the rights returning to the landowner. Production and certain drilling operations interrupt that clock. For families holding older north Louisiana interests, the practical question is whether the servitude has been kept alive continuously since it was created. That research is part of what we do before making an offer, and we share what we find with you.
A carbon dioxide flood is a form of enhanced oil recovery in which the operator injects CO2 into the reservoir to mobilize oil that primary and secondary recovery left behind. At Delhi, the project is unitized across roughly 14,000 gross acres in Franklin, Madison, and Richland parishes and operated by Denbury Onshore. For a royalty owner, the practical effects are a longer field life and production tied to the performance of the injection program rather than to any single wellbore. Value in a flooded unit turns on remaining recovery in the project and on how the unit allocates production, so we read the unit agreement.