Kermit is a shallow Permian oil field in Winkler County, in the sand country of the far western Permian Basin. It sits in the same neighborhood as the Hendrick field, whose 1926 discovery well transformed an almost empty county into one of the leading petroleum producers in Texas within four years. The Kermit field produces from shallow Permian sands and carbonates at depths that keep drilling and workover costs low, and it has been worked through primary depletion and waterflooding into a long, low-rate maturity.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 49038001, 49038071, 49038426, 49038639. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Winkler County had roughly 81 residents in 1920. On July 16, 1926, Roy Westbrook and Company brought in the Hendrick No. 1 on ranchland owned by Thomas G. and Ada Hendrick in the central part of the county, and everything changed. By 1930 the population stood at 6,784. The town of Wink sprang up in the southwestern county, and Kermit, the county seat, reported 1,000 people in 1927 and 1,500 by 1929. The Texas-New Mexico Railway reached Kermit on March 4, 1929.
The Kermit field itself belongs to the wave of step-out development that followed the Hendrick discovery. Operators worked outward from the proven structure, finding shallow Permian pay across a wide area. Shallowness was the defining commercial fact: wells could be drilled in days, and a field that would have been marginal at Permian Basin depths elsewhere was economic here. That same shallowness meant strong early rates and rapid pressure decline, so the flush period was short and the long producing tail began early.
Winkler County settled into the role it still plays: a mature, densely drilled district with a great deal of shallow production, extensive injection infrastructure and low per-well rates. Waterflooding was applied where the reservoirs justified it, and much of the county’s more recent activity has been directed at deeper horizons rather than at the shallow pays. For owners, the Kermit field is best understood as a stripper-grade property whose value rests on longevity and low operating cost rather than on drilling upside.
The shallow Permian section in Winkler County includes the Yates, Seven Rivers, Queen and Grayburg intervals — sandstones and dolomites deposited in shoreline and evaporitic settings on the northwestern shelf of the basin. These reservoirs are shallow, laterally variable, and often modest in individual thickness, with pay distributed across several intervals rather than concentrated in one. Traps combine gentle structure with lateral changes in porosity. The result is a field developed with many closely spaced wells, each producing at low rates but cheap enough to drill, deepen and rework that the economics have held for decades.
Recovery at Kermit has combined primary depletion with waterflooding in the intervals where injection made sense. Shallow Permian sands and dolomites lose pressure quickly, and water injection restores drive and pushes oil toward producing wells, but sweep is uneven where the reservoir is thin or laterally discontinuous. Most of the day-to-day value comes from low-cost operations: pulling and repairing pumps, cleaning out wells, and recompleting into intervals that were skipped during the boom. This is not a field where large-scale enhanced recovery projects are the expectation.
Winkler County minerals often carry two very different components. The shallow production around Kermit is stripper-grade, steady and low-value per barrel of remaining reserves, while deeper rights in this part of the basin have attracted separate leasing and horizontal development on entirely different economics. Owners frequently do not know which of the two they hold, especially where the mineral estate was severed by depth generations ago. Getting that straight is the first step toward a defensible number. We buy minerals and royalties in Winkler County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
No. The Hendrick field is the 1926 discovery that opened Winkler County and created the town of Wink. Kermit is a separate field in the same county, developed during the step-out drilling that followed. They have different leases, different operators over time and different royalty decimals, though they produce from the same general shallow Permian section.
No, and this confuses a lot of owners. The Yates is a Permian formation name used across the northwestern shelf of the basin, while the Yates field is a specific and much larger field in Pecos County. A check stub referencing Yates production in Winkler County refers to the formation, not to that field.
Because low-rate shallow production is remarkably durable. Wells like these have paid for decades and are cheap enough to maintain that they survive price downturns that shut in more expensive production. Buyers value the length and stability of that stream. What they will not pay for is drilling upside that the shallow section does not have, which is why deeper rights need to be valued separately.