The Monahans Field lies in the sand hills where Ward and Winkler counties meet, producing from shallow Permian sands and dolomites on the northwestern side of the Permian Basin. It was developed at the end of the 1920s, during the rush that followed the opening of the nearby Hendrick field in 1926, and the town of Monahans grew from a railroad stop into an oilfield service center on the strength of it. The field has been produced through primary depletion and waterflooding into a long, low-rate maturity.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 62415083, 62415747. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Monahans was a modest railroad town until oil arrived. The Handbook of Texas records that it did not begin to grow rapidly until the opening of the nearby Hendrick oilfield in 1926, after which pipelines and railroad loading tanks were built at Wickett, Pyote and Monahans. Oil was discovered at Grandfalls in 1929, and the community of Royalty was established alongside it. By 1930 Monahans had 816 residents, and the 1930s were boom years, with a carbon black plant opening in 1937 and a chemical plant in 1938.
Ward County production tells the story of the surrounding district. Almost 9,720,000 barrels of crude came out of the county in 1938, more than 6,873,000 barrels in 1944, and 6,074,000 barrels in 1948. Growth resumed strongly in the deep-drilling era: over 11,430,000 barrels in 1956, 22,235,000 barrels in 1960 and more than 28,245,000 barrels in 1965. By January 1, 1991 the county had produced roughly 670 million barrels since 1928. The Monahans field is one of many contributors to that total.
The shallow Permian pays around Monahans behaved the way shallow reservoirs do: strong early rates, quick pressure decline, then a very long tail sustained by injection and cheap workovers. Waterflooding was applied where the reservoirs justified it. More recent activity in Ward and Winkler counties has been directed at much deeper horizons, and the Delaware Basin horizontal boom of the last decade has transformed leasing in the area without changing the shallow production itself. Monahans remains a mature stripper-grade property.
The shallow Permian section here includes the Yates, Seven Rivers, Queen and Grayburg intervals, sandstones and dolomites laid down in shoreline and evaporitic settings along the margin of the basin. Individual pay zones are often thin and laterally variable, with production spread across several intervals rather than concentrated in one thick reservoir. Trapping combines gentle structure with lateral changes in porosity. Because these reservoirs sit at shallow depth beneath the sand hills, they could be drilled quickly and cheaply, which is the entire reason marginal rates have remained economic for so long.
Recovery here has combined primary depletion with waterflooding in the intervals that support it. Water injection restores pressure and pushes oil toward producing wells, but sweep is uneven in thin and discontinuous reservoirs, so a good deal of oil stays behind. The routine work is unglamorous and decisive: repairing pumps, cleaning out wells, managing produced water and recompleting into intervals bypassed during the boom. Owners should expect gradual decline rather than recovery, with the field’s survival depending on operating cost discipline more than on any new technology.
Ward and Winkler county minerals commonly carry two very different values stacked on the same tract. Shallow production around Monahans is stripper-grade and valued on the stability of a small income stream. Deeper Delaware Basin rights in the same counties have been leased and drilled horizontally on entirely different economics, sometimes under separate leases and separate decimals. Owners often do not know which they hold, particularly where the mineral estate was severed by depth decades ago. We buy minerals and royalties in Ward and Winkler counties and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Only geographically. The shallow Permian intervals around Monahans sit far above the Wolfcamp and Bone Spring targets of modern horizontal drilling, and they are usually held under different leases with different operators and decimals. Sharing in the deeper development depends on whether your mineral ownership covers all depths, which has to be checked in the recorded instruments.
Shallow stripper production is sensitive to workovers, pump failures, water handling and oil price, and volumes are small enough that a single well being down for repairs shows up clearly in a check. Sales timing also causes swings when small volumes are batched. Persistent decline over a year or more is the meaningful signal; month-to-month noise usually is not.
Start with the deed that created the interest and read whether it reserved or conveyed all depths. Then check every subsequent lease and any depth severance recorded against the tract. Interests in these counties were often carved up during the 1920s boom and again during recent deep leasing. We can review the documents and identify what is actually producing for you.