Historic Oil Field
Midland Farms takes its name from a land company, not an oil company. The Midland Farms Company was David Fasken’s vehicle for the 227,000-acre "C" Ranch, and the town of Fasken was platted on it in 1917. Oil came later: the main San Andres and Grayburg field was discovered in the mid-1940s, a Grayburg extension to the north followed in 1953, and a separate Ellenburger reservoir was found nearly two miles beneath the shallow pay in 1952. The result is a stacked field with more than 160 million barrels from the shallow reservoir alone.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 61118001, 61118332, 61130001, 61118830, 61120500. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Railroad Commission reservoir records carry a 1945 discovery year for the main Midland Farms field, while the Texas Almanac lists 1944; the discovery well itself is not documented in readily available public sources. Either way, the timing places Midland Farms in the wartime and immediate post-war wave of Central Basin Platform and Midland Basin discoveries, when seismic reflection work was rapidly replacing surface geology as the primary exploration tool across Andrews County.
The northern extension has a clearer record. Midland Farms, North (Grayburg) was discovered in July 1953 by the Pan American Petroleum Corporation — formerly Stanolind Oil & Gas — with its Midland Farms AE No. 1. Unitization and secondary-recovery studies began roughly eighteen months after that discovery, and a peripheral waterflood was chosen as the optimum recovery scheme. A published performance history of that flood appeared in the Journal of Petroleum Technology in 1961, making it one of the better-documented early Grayburg floods in the basin.
Beneath the shallow field, operators found an entirely separate structure. Anderson-Prichard’s No. 1 Fasken-24, completed September 16, 1952 on a single-fold seismic structure, opened the Midland Farms (Ellenburger) reservoir, which has itself produced roughly 51 million barrels. A Midland Farms Deep designation followed in 1986. Modern Railroad Commission records show Occidental Permian associated with the Midland Farms Unit and Midland Farms Deep Unit, while Fasken family entities still appear as operator on legacy leases in the field.
The shallow Midland Farms reservoir is the type example of a San Andres and Grayburg lowstand carbonate: the Grayburg onlaps the platform downdip of the terminal San Andres margin, and the contact between them is a sequence boundary rather than a simple bedding plane. Pay tops sit around 4,800 feet. Far below, the Ellenburger reservoir at roughly 9,000 to 10,000 feet is a completely different animal — a fractured Ordovician dolomite trapped on structure and found by seismic, with no depositional relationship to the shallow field at all.
Recovery here has been driven by waterflooding, and the northern Grayburg unit is the documented case: unitized within about eighteen months of its 1953 discovery, then developed on a peripheral injection pattern chosen after formal reservoir study. That is unusually disciplined for the era, and it shows in the field’s long production tail — the main reservoir was still producing about a million barrels a year at the turn of the century, more than fifty years after discovery. Midland Farms has been screened as amenable to CO2 flooding, but no CO2 project has been documented.
The stacked structure is what makes Midland Farms interests worth reading carefully. A tract can carry shallow San Andres and Grayburg royalty under one unit, deeper Ellenburger royalty under another, and a Deep designation on top of that — each with its own decimal and its own remaining life. Owners frequently discover they hold more than the one line item their check shows. Sorting out the full picture before pricing is the whole job. We buy minerals and royalties in Andrews County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
It depends entirely on your deed. Many West Texas mineral conveyances were made without depth severance, in which case you own all depths; others were severed by formation or by depth in a later transaction. Because the Ellenburger reservoir here is separately designated and separately unitized, a depth severance in your chain of title changes the value materially. It is one of the first things we check.
In a peripheral flood, injection wells ring the outside of the reservoir and push oil inward toward the producers rather than injecting in patterns throughout it. Practically, it means production holds up longer and declines more gently than a primary-depletion field, and it also means your tract’s position within the unit affects when you see the benefit. Unit tract factors are designed to smooth that out.
Both, and they are valued differently. Shallow San Andres and Grayburg flood production gives a slow, long tail. Horizontal development targeting other intervals in Andrews County is a separate and more episodic source of value. A serious offer should tell you which components it is paying for rather than presenting one blended number with no explanation behind it.