Jordan is a San Andres carbonate field on the Central Basin Platform, spanning the Ector and Crane county line in the middle of the Permian Basin. It was developed in the late 1930s, during the expansion that followed the region’s first great strikes, and it has spent most of its producing life under waterflood. The two counties it sits in are among the most productive in Texas: Ector produced more than 2.7 billion barrels through 1990, and Crane approached 1.6 billion by 1991. Jordan today is a mature, injection-supported property.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 47267001, 47267228, 47267456, 47267608, 47267836. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
The Permian Basin story in this area starts with two discoveries. Oil was found in Crane County in 1926, setting off a boom that drew thousands of people to what had been almost empty ranch country. The same year, the great strike on W. E. Connell’s ranch opened Ector County, followed by the Penn field in 1929 and the Cowden field in 1930. By the mid-1930s the Central Basin Platform was understood well enough that operators could step out systematically from known production rather than wildcatting blind.
Jordan was developed in that step-out phase. San Andres dolomite underlies most of the platform at shallow to moderate depth, and once its extent was understood, fields could be delineated and drilled quickly and cheaply. Crane County production rose from more than 5,494,600 barrels in 1938 to more than 9,557,500 barrels in 1944 and 16,851,698 barrels in 1948. Development was intense enough through this period that infrastructure — roads, tank batteries, gathering lines and gas plants — was in place before most of the fields reached their peak.
Like nearly every San Andres field on the platform, Jordan saw reservoir pressure fall under primary production and was converted to waterflood to restore drive and sweep bypassed oil. Crane County output peaked around 1960 at almost 30,731,500 barrels and had fallen to almost 19,026,000 barrels by 1990. That trajectory is the honest picture for Jordan as well: a long decline, slowed but not reversed by injection, with value coming from the length of the tail rather than from any expectation of renewed growth.
Jordan produces from the Permian San Andres dolomite, with Grayburg pay above it in places, deposited across the Central Basin Platform in shallow marine and tidal-flat settings. San Andres reservoirs typically have moderate porosity, uneven permeability, and clear vertical layering with tight streaks separating better intervals. Traps combine gentle structural closure with lateral changes in porosity and permeability. The shallow depth allowed dense well spacing and inexpensive workovers during development, and the layered character is why flood performance depends so much on how injection is allocated between zones.
Waterflooding defines the modern Jordan field. Injected water restores reservoir pressure and displaces oil that primary depletion could not reach, and in San Andres reservoirs that typically adds a substantial fraction of the original oil in place to ultimate recovery. The persistent engineering problem is vertical conformance: water enters the most permeable layer first and can bypass thick sections of pay, so operators use selective completions, profile control and pattern conversions to spread the sweep. The area’s dense injection and water-handling infrastructure makes that maintenance work comparatively cheap to keep up.
Jordan royalties are unit income from a mature flood, which means steady, modest checks and a value that turns on how the specific unit is performing rather than on a drilling forecast. Because the field crosses a county line, a single family’s interests may carry separate decimals in Ector and Crane counties, and it is common to find one being paid and the other sitting in suspense. Deeper horizons in this area may also be leased separately. We buy minerals and royalties in Ector and Crane counties and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
San Andres fields are waterflooded, and a flood only works when the reservoir is operated as one hydraulic system. The operator pools the leases into a unit, allocates production by a participation formula, and pays each owner a decimal based on that formula. Your payment reflects a share of the whole unit’s production, not the output of the nearest well.
San Andres reservoirs on the Central Basin Platform are the classic carbon dioxide flood target in the United States, and several fields in the surrounding area have been flooded for decades. Whether any specific field is converted depends on the operator, on carbon dioxide supply and on economics. We do not assert a plan for this field, and an interest should not be valued as though one exists.
The Railroad Commission publishes production by lease and by unit, so the record is public once you know which properties you are paid on. Your check stubs or division orders carry the property numbers. Send us those and we will pull the production history, show you the decline trend, and put a written offer against it.