Beaver Creek Field lies roughly fifteen miles southeast of Riverton in Fremont County, Wyoming, on the flank of the Wind River Basin. The field was found in 1938, and for seventy years it produced mainly from a stack of shallow Cretaceous sands — Frontier, Muddy, and Lakota — while the deep Madison limestone beneath held oil that natural depletion could never efficiently reach. In 2008 a carbon dioxide flood was started in that Madison zone, and Beaver Creek became one of Wyoming’s clearest demonstrations of what tertiary recovery can do to a mature royalty stream.
The discovery well, the Johnson No. 1, was completed in 1938 as a gas well in the Lakota sand — an outcome that hinted at the field’s layered character rather than announcing a giant. Development through the following decades worked outward and upward through several Frontier sands and the Muddy, each effectively a separate pool with its own pressure history and its own set of leases. Fremont County drilling in that era was a patient business: modest wells, long lives, and operators who added zones as pipeline access and prices allowed rather than all at once.
The Madison limestone changed the field’s ceiling. Lying more than eleven thousand feet down, it holds far more oil than the shallow sands above it, but carbonate reservoirs of that kind surrender only a fraction of what they contain under natural drive. Beaver Creek produced from the Madison for decades at falling rates, and by the 2000s the zone had settled into a few hundred barrels a day. That is the profile of a field which has done everything primary recovery can do and is drifting quietly toward abandonment rather than toward reinvestment.
In July 2008 Devon Energy began injecting carbon dioxide into the Madison, supplied by pipeline from ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek gas processing plant in southwestern Wyoming. Published accounts of the project describe Madison output climbing from a few hundred barrels a day before the flood into the thousands afterward, with incremental recovery projected in the millions of barrels. The property has changed hands since the flood was launched, which is unremarkable for CO2 assets in the Rockies. Owners should treat operator changes on their division orders as routine paperwork rather than as a signal about the field.
Beaver Creek is an anticline on the southern side of the Wind River Basin, productive across a long vertical column. The shallow pays are Cretaceous sandstones — several separate Frontier sands, the Muddy, and the Lakota — trapped by a combination of structure and changes in sand quality. Far beneath them sits the Mississippian Madison limestone at roughly eleven thousand feet, a carbonate with the thickness and continuity that miscible flooding requires. That vertical separation matters to owners, because one tract can hold interests in shallow sand pools and in the deep Madison unit at once, paid on entirely different schedules.
Carbon dioxide injection into the Madison is what defines Beaver Creek today. Miscible CO2 mixes with the residual oil that natural depletion left behind, swells it, and carries it toward producing wells rather than simply pushing on it the way water does. The flood has run since 2008 on CO2 delivered from western Wyoming, and the response reported for the Madison unit — an order-of-magnitude rate increase off a low base — is exactly the pattern that makes flood-supported royalties behave unlike anything in the shale basins. The resulting tail is long, shallow, and dependent on continued injection.
A Beaver Creek interest is worth understanding zone by zone. Shallow Cretaceous production is old, small, and slowly declining; the Madison CO2 unit is where the modern value concentrates, and its performance depends on injection an operator can expand, hold flat, or curtail. Buyers who price the interest off a trailing twelve months of checks routinely misjudge both halves. Interests here are also frequently divided among heirs who have never seen the unit agreements that govern them. We buy minerals and royalties in Fremont County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Because a carbon dioxide flood was started in the deep Madison limestone that year, using CO2 piped from southwestern Wyoming. Miscible CO2 recovers oil that primary depletion leaves stranded in carbonate rock, and the Madison unit’s rate rose substantially off a low pre-flood base.
That depends on your lease and on whether your tract was committed to the Madison unit. Many Fremont County tracts participate in shallow pools and in the deep unit separately, which is why owners here often receive more than one payment from what they think of as a single interest.
Often yes, because flood-supported production declines slowly and reflects capital an operator has already committed. It can also be worth less if injection is being wound down. The honest answer requires modeling the unit rather than multiplying recent income, which is what our free written offers show you.