The Mabee Field lies about sixteen miles northwest of Midland, straddling the Andrews-Martin county line beneath one of West Texas’ best-known ranches. It produces from San Andres dolomite at roughly 4,700 feet, draped over a much deeper Ordovician structure, and it has passed 115 million barrels. Since January 1992 it has also been one of the Permian Basin’s established miscible CO2 floods. For mineral owners, Mabee is a clean illustration of what tertiary recovery does to a royalty: a shallow 1940s field that gained a second production life fifty years in.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 56378001, 13924001, 56381200. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
The ranch came before the field. J. E. Mabee and his wife Lottie were Missouri natives who homesteaded in Oklahoma in 1907; his break came when two Burkburnett wells hit in 1919, and Mabee Consolidated Corporation grew into a very large drilling contractor. He diversified into banking, insurance and ranching, assembling a Hereford operation near Midland covering roughly 110 square miles. That ranch is the surface over this field, and Mabee lease and royalty names still appear throughout Railroad Commission records in Andrews, Martin and Midland counties.
Railroad Commission reservoir records and the technical literature both date the field discovery to 1943, with pay tops near 4,704 feet; the Texas Almanac lists 1944, and a 1945 completion extended the shallow field from Andrews into southwestern Martin County, which likely accounts for the differing dates. The discovery well itself is not documented in readily available public sources. Development proceeded as a conventional shallow San Andres field, produced first on primary drive and then under waterflood.
J. E. Mabee founded the J. E. and L. E. Mabee Foundation in 1948, and on his death in 1961 the Foundation became the principal beneficiary of his estate, including Mabee Royalties and Mabee Investments — an arrangement that has funded charitable giving across the region for decades. On the operating side, Texaco ran the field through the modern era and designed the CO2 project; after the 2001 Chevron-Texaco merger the field was long associated with Chevron. Operatorship of the shallow unit has since changed hands.
Mabee produces from Upper Permian San Andres dolomite averaging about 4,700 feet, draped over a deep Ordovician structure. The reservoir facies are dolomitized subtidal mudstones, wackestones and peloid packstones with oolite packstone and grainstone intervals; porosity averages roughly 10.5 percent and geometric-mean permeability about one millidarcy. Interfingering sandstones are tightly cemented and act as internal flow barriers, and the seal is low-permeability supratidal dolomite with anhydrite. A natural fracture trend runs about N70W while present-day maximum horizontal stress runs N45E.
Mabee went to miscible CO2 injection in January 1992, covering about 6,000 acres of the roughly 12,100-acre field at 4,700 feet, with several hundred producers and dozens of injectors. Federal inventories credited the project with 13.7 million barrels of incremental CO2-EOR oil by the mid-2000s and estimated ultimate CO2 recovery near 23.6 million barrels. The flood design deliberately targets the upper reservoir zones and excludes the vuggy, fractured high-permeability streaks below, which would thief injected CO2 rather than sweep oil toward producers.
A CO2 flood changes the shape of a royalty stream, and shape is what drives price. Mabee royalties are supported by continuing tertiary injection rather than by natural decline alone, which means the recent twelve months of checks are a poor guide to the remaining twenty years. Fracture-aware, zone-selective flood management also means production can respond unevenly across the unit. Interests like these deserve a method-aware valuation rather than a generic multiple. We buy minerals and royalties in Andrews and Martin counties and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Injected CO2 mobilizes oil that waterflooding left behind, so gross production is higher and lasts longer than it otherwise would. What you receive still follows your lease royalty terms, and produced CO2 is recycled rather than sold, so it does not add a gas royalty line. The practical effect is a longer, flatter oil stream instead of a steady march toward plugging.
No. Surface and minerals are separate estates in Texas, and in this area they were severed long ago. Owning a mineral or royalty interest under the ranch does not require any surface ownership, and changes in surface ownership do not alter your decimal. Your rights come from your deed and the lease covering your tract.
Usually not. Horizontal development on the ranch surface targets deeper unconventional intervals and is reported under different field designations than the shallow San Andres Mabee field and its CO2 unit. They can both touch the same tract while paying under entirely different leases and decimals, so it is worth confirming which one your check detail actually references.