Historic Oil Field
The North Ward Estes Field spans roughly 58,000 acres across Ward and Winkler counties, Texas — a shallow sandstone giant discovered in 1929 during the Permian Basin’s first great boom. Producing from the Yates and Queen sands, the field has yielded several hundred million barrels across nearly a century, first through dense primary drilling, then waterflooding, and finally a field-wide CO2 flood built out in the 2000s. For mineral owners around Monahans, Wickett, and Kermit, North Ward Estes is proof that old sand can carry royalty income across generations.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 95152001, 95152475, 95152250. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
North Ward Estes was opened in 1929, part of the drilling wave that swept Ward and Winkler counties after the 1926 Hendrick discovery proved the region. The shallow Yates and Queen sands could be reached cheaply with the cable-tool rigs of the day, and development was rapid and dense — thousands of wells eventually dotted the field. Towns like Wickett and Monahans grew up around the play as pipelines and refineries followed the oil.
Like most Permian sand fields, North Ward Estes saw pressure decline force a shift to secondary recovery, and waterflooding sustained production through the mid-century decades under a series of major operators. The decisive modern chapter began after Whiting Petroleum assembled the field in the 2000s: Whiting launched a field-wide CO2 flood, injecting first CO2 in 2007 and scaling injection dramatically in the years that followed, targeting oil that eighty years of primary and waterflood recovery had left in place.
Whiting invested heavily in the flood before selling the property in 2016 in a transaction reported in the $300 million range, and the asset has since been managed by successor owners focused on mature EOR properties. The field remains an active producing complex with response from the CO2 program layered on top of a vast legacy wellbore inventory — a classic Permian story of serial reinvention.
The field produces from the Yates and Queen sandstones at shallow depths, generally around 2,600 feet, on the western flank of the Central Basin Platform. These Permian-age sands were deposited in arid, marginal-marine settings and form laterally extensive, moderately permeable reservoirs sealed by evaporites. Shallow depth made the field cheap to drill and easy to re-enter, while the sands’ stratified architecture left substantial oil behind primary recovery — exactly the kind of target that rewards waterflooding and, later, miscible CO2 injection.
North Ward Estes is one of the Permian Basin’s notable CO2-flood conversions. After decades of waterflood, Whiting designed and executed a phased, field-wide CO2 project beginning in 2007, ramping injection to substantial volumes and reworking hundreds of wells. CO2 floods recover incremental oil over very long horizons — response builds slowly and persists for decades. For royalty owners, that means the field’s payout timeline was deliberately extended: EOR economics assume many more years of production, and royalty interests share in every incremental barrel without bearing any of the capital cost.
Mineral and royalty interests under North Ward Estes carry nearly a century of production history and an EOR program engineered to extend it further. Interests here are often fragmented across generations of heirs, and valuations that ignore CO2-flood response or treat the field as simple decline can miss real value. Before selling, owners should understand which units their acreage sits in and how injection activity affects their checks. 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:
Yes. The field has produced continuously since 1929 and remains an active complex, with a large legacy well inventory and a CO2 flood built out in the 2000s that continues to support recovery from the Yates and Queen sands.
The field passed through major operators over its first decades, was consolidated by Whiting Petroleum in the 2000s — which built the field-wide CO2 flood — and was sold in 2016 to successor owners specializing in mature enhanced-recovery assets.
Start with your deed or division orders to confirm your decimal interest, then get a written offer grounded in actual production and the field’s EOR-extended life. We evaluate North Ward Estes interests directly and provide free, no-obligation written offers.