Historic Oil Field
Howard-Glasscock is one of the original Permian Basin giants and one of the most densely developed. Discovered in 1925 on the Eastern Shelf south of Big Spring, it has produced more than 400 million barrels from a stack of shallow Permian sands and dolomites, and it is still being worked today on five- and ten-acre infill spacing. For mineral owners it is a useful case study in what a century of waterflooding, redrilling and unit reshaping does to a royalty stream — and why a field this old is not the same thing as a field that is finished.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 42971664, 42971332. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Howard County drew wildcatters well before it had production. Promotions run by S. E. J. Cox and Frederick A. Cook between 1917 and 1920 sold interests in wells that never made oil, and Cox was convicted of fraud in 1923. Legitimate production followed in 1925, when drilling on the McDowell Ranch in Glasscock County opened what became the Howard-Glasscock Field. Commercial development came quickly after that, and the boom well most West Texans remember — the Otis Chalk No. 1 — came in on April 18, 1926, a year after discovery.
The field developed as a stack rather than a single pay. Operators produced Yates, Seven Rivers and Queen sands along with the Grayburg and San Andres dolomites, all reachable at shallow depths that started as high as roughly 1,500 feet. The Glorieta was reported inside the main field until 1969, when the Railroad Commission broke it out as Howard-Glasscock (Glorieta); a Clear Fork, Middle designation followed in 1970. Counted together, those reservoirs make Howard-Glasscock the largest field on the Eastern Shelf San Andres platform.
A pilot waterflood began in 1964, and by the 1970s operators were running extensive coring programs to plan injection wells across the Glorieta, Clear Fork, San Andres, Queen and Seven Rivers on ten-acre patterns with multiple-zone completions. Redevelopment continued into the modern era: a five- and ten-acre infill program launched in 2009, and published work on the field reports roughly a 22 percent improvement in expected recovery per well from waterflooding. Citation Oil & Gas acquired the Howard Glasscock field position from ConocoPhillips around 2017.
Howard-Glasscock sits on the Eastern Shelf of the Midland Basin, where shallow Permian shelf sands and dolomites are stacked one on top of another. Reservoir quality varies enormously by zone: the Yates sand runs about 23 percent porosity and 200 millidarcies, the Seven Rivers and Queen roughly 19 to 20 percent porosity at 11 to 34 millidarcies, while the Grayburg-San Andres dolomite averages closer to 10.5 percent porosity and 5 millidarcies. That contrast is why a single lease can hold both a fast, sweep-friendly sand and a tight carbonate that needs completely different injection management.
Waterflooding here is not one project but many, layered over sixty years. After the 1964 pilot, operators flooded zone by zone on ten-acre patterns, then tightened to five acres during the infill program that began in 2009. Tiltmeter surveys in the Howard Glasscock East unit showed something operators needed to know: injection at ordinary waterflood pressures was actually fracturing the rock, with fractures propagating roughly east-west. The field has been screened as technically amenable to CO2 flooding, but no CO2 project has been documented here.
A Howard-Glasscock royalty is a multi-zone royalty, and that is the whole valuation problem. Your tract may be under a unit that floods four separate reservoirs, and the Glorieta and Clear Fork were later split into their own Railroad Commission fields, so different pays can sit under different leases with different terms. Infill drilling on five-acre spacing can lift production years after a buyer assumed the tract had flattened. That is worth pricing rather than guessing at. We buy minerals and royalties in Howard and Glasscock counties and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
It can, materially. Tightening from ten-acre to five-acre spacing puts new wellbores into rock the old pattern never drained, and published work on this field attributes roughly a 22 percent per-well recovery improvement to waterflooding. Whether that reaches you depends on whether the new wells fall inside a unit your tract participates in and at what tract factor. That is one of the first things we check.
Because the Railroad Commission carved reservoirs out of the original field over time. The Glorieta was broken out as its own field in 1969 and a Clear Fork, Middle field followed in 1970. Your surface tract has not changed, but the production beneath it is now reported under several designations, and each can carry its own lease, unit and decimal.
We would not price a decision on that. Howard-Glasscock has been screened as technically amenable to CO2 flooding, but no CO2 project has been documented in the field, and screening studies are not commitments. If a flood were announced, the value of a nearby interest would reflect it — but waiting on an unannounced project means carrying declining production in the meantime.