The Diamond M Field sits on the Horseshoe Atoll in Scurry County, immediately south of SACROC and north of Sharon Ridge. Shallow production on the Diamond M Ranch dates to 1940, but the field that matters is the Canyon Reef pay found in December 1948, unitized around 1951, and waterflooded from late that same year. It is one of the four Scurry County units whose formation ended what a contemporary account called haphazard production of the Scurry reef — and it is now being evaluated for tertiary recovery for the first time.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 24562142, 24562284, 24562568. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
The ranch supplied the name. Clarence T. McLaughlin bought the Diamond M Ranch in 1935, twelve miles southwest of Snyder, and the Texas Almanac dates a Diamond M field discovery in Scurry County to 1940. That early production was shallow. The Canyon Reef beneath it went unrecognized until 1948, when four widely dispersed wells penetrated the reef at roughly 6,500 feet and Lion Oil Company completed its No. 2 McLaughlin on Diamond M land in December of that year at 650 barrels a day, making the McLaughlin family wealthy.
What happened next was an engineering decision rather than a drilling one. By 1951 engineers calculated that competitive operation of the reef would recover only about twenty percent of the oil in place, and that unitized pressure maintenance could roughly double it. Unitization agreements for Diamond M and Sharon Ridge Canyon were approved around 1951, and water injection into Diamond M began late that year. SACROC operators built a row of injection wells along the Diamond M boundary to control fluid migration across the unit line.
The Lion Diamond M Canyon Unit covers roughly 5,500 gross acres and has produced about 44 million barrels. Lion Oil gave way over the decades to Parallel Petroleum, which shot 3-D seismic in 2006 and worked the unit through workovers and infill drilling. Kinder Morgan acquired the Diamond M interest for roughly $15 million in 2023 and has stated it is applying enhanced recovery processes for tertiary recovery — a natural step given SACROC and its CO2 infrastructure sit directly next door.
Diamond M produces from the Pennsylvanian Canyon Reef at roughly 6,500 to 6,700 feet, part of the Horseshoe Atoll — the great arc of carbonate buildups beneath Scurry, Kent, Borden and Fisher counties that also hosts SACROC, Cogdell and Kelly-Snyder. Atoll reef reservoirs have high porosity in the reef core and rapidly degrading quality on the flanks, and because the reef is hydraulically connected across unit boundaries, injection in one unit measurably affects a neighbor. That connectivity is precisely why the four Scurry units were formed together in the early 1950s.
Diamond M has been a waterflood since late 1951, and it remains one — this is not a decades-old CO2 project. That distinction matters. Kinder Morgan, which operates SACROC and its CO2 supply next door, acquired the Diamond M interest in 2023 and has stated it is actively working to apply tertiary recovery processes here, with proximity to SACROC making CO2 the obvious candidate. If that proceeds, Diamond M would follow the same arc SACROC did: primary, then waterflood, then a tertiary phase that adds decades to the unit’s life.
A Diamond M royalty is a unit royalty, so what drives it is the tract factor and the unit’s recovery program, not any individual wellbore. The unit is at a genuine inflection point: waterflood decline on one side, a stated tertiary recovery effort by a CO2 operator on the other. Interests like that are frequently mispriced in both directions, because generic decline models cannot see a program that has not started yet. We buy minerals and royalties in Scurry County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
If your tract participates in the unit, yes — incremental unit production flows to owners through the tract factor established in the unit agreement. What you cannot control is timing or scope. Tertiary projects take years to design, permit and respond, so an owner deciding whether to hold should be clear-eyed that the benefit, if it comes, is measured in years rather than months.
A tract factor is the percentage of unit production allocated to your tract under the unitization agreement, usually based on acreage, productive rock volume or historical production. It is set out in the recorded unit agreement and reflected in your division order. If you do not have either document, the recorded unit agreement in the Scurry County records is the authoritative source.
Adjacency matters for a practical reason: the CO2 supply infrastructure and the operating expertise are already in place, which lowers the barrier to a tertiary project here compared with an isolated reef. It does not make Diamond M barrels the same as SACROC barrels. Value still depends on your unit, your tract factor and what is actually being spent on the ground.