Cabin Creek Field sits in Fallon County, Montana on the Cedar Creek Anticline — a long, narrow structural high running southeast out of the Williston Basin that has produced oil and gas for roughly a century. Shell discovered the field in May 1953 with the Unit 22-23 well, finding pay in Silurian Interlake and Ordovician Red River carbonates thousands of feet down. Waterflooding began within a few years and has sustained the field ever since, making a Cabin Creek royalty a long-life conventional stream.
The Cedar Creek Anticline was one of the earliest producing trends in the region: shallow gas was found on the structure in 1913 and oil followed in 1936, well before the North Dakota discoveries of the 1950s made the Williston Basin a major oil province. Deeper drilling on the anticline eventually reached Paleozoic carbonates that turned out to hold far more oil than the shallow Cretaceous zones, and Cabin Creek was one of the fields that resulted.
Shell drilled the Cabin Creek discovery, the Unit 22-23, in May 1953 and developed the field through the following decade. Production came from the Silurian Interlake and the Ordovician Red River, both genuine carbonate reservoirs with matrix porosity. Waterflooding was introduced beginning in the late 1950s to maintain reservoir pressure, and it is the reason the field has produced continuously for more than seventy years rather than declining away in its first two decades.
Operatorship has moved several times since. Encore Acquisition purchased Shell’s Cedar Creek Anticline interests around 1999 and pursued infill drilling and recompletions, and Denbury Resources took over the position around 2010 with an eye toward carbon dioxide flooding across the anticline. ExxonMobil acquired Denbury in 2023. Carbon dioxide enhanced recovery in the Red River units on the Cedar Creek Anticline has been studied and planned for years, though the pace of implementation has varied.
Cabin Creek produces from Paleozoic carbonates on the Cedar Creek Anticline: the Silurian Interlake and the Ordovician Red River, both dolomites and limestones with real matrix porosity and permeability. The anticline is a long, faulted structural high that traps oil across a stacked series of units within each formation, so the field is developed as a set of separately managed pools rather than a single reservoir. Depths run several thousand feet, and reservoir quality varies substantially between units along the structure.
Waterflooding has been the mainstay at Cabin Creek since the late 1950s, maintaining reservoir pressure and sweeping oil toward producing wells across the Interlake and Red River units. In carbonates of this kind, waterflood can lift ultimate recovery well above primary depletion and produce for decades at low but persistent rates. Carbon dioxide flooding of the Red River units along the Cedar Creek Anticline has been evaluated and planned as a further step, aimed at oil the waterflood cannot displace.
A Cabin Creek royalty is a long-duration conventional asset: seventy years of operating history, slow decline supported by injection, and the possibility of a further recovery phase if carbon dioxide flooding advances on the anticline. That combination is valued very differently from a shale interest, and offers vary widely with how a buyer models remaining flood life. Interests here are frequently fractionalized among distant heirs. We buy minerals and royalties in Fallon County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
It is a long, narrow structural high extending southeast from the Williston Basin across eastern Montana into the Dakotas. It has produced since shallow gas was found on it in 1913, with oil following in 1936 and deeper Paleozoic carbonate production, including Cabin Creek, developed from the 1950s onward.
The field has been under waterflood since the late 1950s. Carbon dioxide enhanced recovery in the Red River units along the Cedar Creek Anticline has been studied and planned, and the operator has held it as a development option, but implementation across the anticline has advanced in stages rather than all at once.
Because the field is developed as multiple units within different formations, and your acreage may participate in more than one. Each unit calculates its own allocation and issues its own payment. Your check stubs will name the unit, which is how we identify what you own when preparing an offer.