Historic Oil Field
Iatan-East Howard is a quiet field with a remarkable record: discovered in 1926, it has produced continuously for roughly a century from thin, fractured Permian carbonate stringers between 2,300 and 3,200 feet. It has held a steady 1,000 to 3,000 barrels a day since 1962 — not a giant, but almost unnaturally durable. It straddles the Howard-Mitchell county line, which is why some sources file it under one county and some under the other, and it is a textbook example of a field kept alive by reservoir description work rather than by new discoveries.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 44148500, 44147500, 44149001. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
The field was discovered in 1926, in the same wave of Permian Basin discoveries that produced Hendrick and the Yates Field, and it is listed in the Texas Almanac chronology under Howard County for that year. The discovery well is not documented in readily available public sources — unlike Westbrook or Hendrick, Iatan-East Howard never produced a blowout or a boomtown worth writing about. It settled into steady development, which turned out to be its long-run advantage.
Mobil held the legacy position and made the field a case study in applied reservoir description. A 1984 study published through the AAPG mapped the thin, discontinuous porosity stringers in detail, and follow-on waterflood optimization work published by the West Texas Geological Society in 1988 documented what that mapping bought: drilling forty producers and thirteen injectors on the strength of the description work, and roughly doubling lease production in two years.
Later ownership moved through the mid-continent independent market — Legacy Reserves held properties here in the mid-2000s, reporting 10.4 million barrels of gross cumulative production from its own interests through mid-2006, and CrownQuest Operating later held and marketed a large position covering roughly 7,900 gross acres, all held by production across Clearfork, San Andres and Wolfcamp rights. Because interests here have changed hands repeatedly, the field is best described as multi-operator rather than attributed to any single company today.
The pay at Iatan-East Howard is Permian San Angelo and Clear Fork dolomite in porosity stringers just two to forty feet thick, at depths of roughly 2,300 to 3,200 feet. Porosity runs 4 to 17 percent and permeability spans 0.1 to 120 millidarcies — an enormous range for one field. The reservoirs are naturally fractured and areally discontinuous, because depositional conditions controlled where porosity developed. That discontinuity is why the field responds so strongly to detailed mapping: an infill well can find pay a neighboring wellbore missed entirely.
Waterflooding began in the late 1960s and has carried the field ever since, holding output between 1,000 and 3,000 barrels a day for more than sixty years. The published Mobil work makes the mechanism explicit: in discontinuous, fractured stringer pay, the return comes from correctly placing injectors and producers relative to individual porosity bodies, not from field-wide pattern geometry. Operators who did that mapping doubled lease production in two years. The field has no documented CO2 project; its value comes from disciplined shallow waterflood management.
Owners here should be aware that the field straddles a county line, so a single family interest can be recorded in two different counties’ deed records — a routine source of missed acreage during estate transfers. Production is shallow, low-rate and remarkably steady, which is the profile least well served by a quick multiple of the last few checks. Reservoir discontinuity also means adjacent tracts genuinely differ in value. We buy minerals and royalties in Howard and Mitchell counties and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
It is common for tracts along the Howard-Mitchell line and it is manageable, but it does require care. Deeds, probates and prior conveyances all have to be traced in both counties’ records, and heirs sometimes transfer the Howard County portion while overlooking the Mitchell County portion. We run both when we prepare an offer so you know exactly what you hold.
This field’s pay is thin, fractured and areally discontinuous, so productive porosity is present in some places and simply absent a short distance away. That is a depositional fact, not an operator problem. It also means value here is genuinely tract-specific, and any offer that treats all acreage in the field as interchangeable is not doing the work.
Not necessarily. Output has been essentially flat between 1,000 and 3,000 barrels a day since 1962, which is the signature of a well-managed waterflood rather than a dying field. Remaining life in shallow floods like this is generally limited by lifting economics and disposal capacity rather than by running out of oil in place.