Raccoon Bend lies northeast of Bellville in Austin County, on the inner Gulf Coast plain between Houston and the Brazos bottomlands. The Handbook of Texas dates its opening to 1927 and credits it with beginning commercial oil production in the county, which had seen its first petroleum discovery in 1915 without commercial results. The field produces from Eocene sands and has been sustained through waterflooding. From the end of the Second World War until 1980, Austin County output rarely fell below a million barrels a year.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 74106080, 74106120, 74106240, 74106320, 74106350, 74106400, 74106570, 74106840. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Petroleum was first discovered in Austin County in 1915, but nothing commercial came of it for more than a decade. The situation changed in 1927 when the Raccoon Bend field opened northeast of Bellville, and the county at last had real production. Other finds followed near Bellville, New Ulm and Orange Hill. For a county whose economy had been built on cotton, corn and cattle since German and Czech settlement in the nineteenth century, the arrival of oilfield work and royalty income was a significant change.
Raccoon Bend proved unusually durable. The Handbook of Texas records that from the end of the Second World War until 1980, the county’s annual crude production seldom fell below a million barrels and occasionally approached three million. That is a long plateau for an inner-coast field, and it reflects both the quality of the Eocene sands and the effect of pressure maintenance. The field became one of the better-known secondary-recovery projects on this part of the coastal plain.
Decline set in after 1980 and has continued. By 2004 the county produced almost 318,767 barrels of oil in the year, and cumulative production since 1915 stood at 114,769,634 barrels. Raccoon Bend accounts for a large share of that total. The field today is a mature, low-rate property, maintained by operators who keep costs down and rework existing wellbores rather than by new drilling. Owners should plan on a gradual tail rather than any recovery in volumes.
Raccoon Bend produces from Eocene sands of the Yegua and Cook Mountain intervals, deposited as deltaic and shoreline sands well inland of the modern Gulf shoreline. Traps on this part of the coastal plain are associated with faulting and gentle folding rather than with piercement salt domes, and pay is typically distributed across several stacked sands rather than concentrated in one thick reservoir. The sands are reasonably porous and permeable, which is why the field responded well to injection and produced on a long plateau instead of declining sharply after its flush period.
Waterflooding is what turned Raccoon Bend from a boom field into a multi-decade producer. Injected water replaces reservoir energy and sweeps oil through the Eocene sands toward producing wells, and stacked-sand fields of this type require injection to be allocated carefully between intervals so that water does not simply channel through the most permeable one. Operators have also relied on recompletions into bypassed sands. The field is well past peak, and the work today is about slowing decline and holding operating costs below the value of a small barrel count.
Austin County royalties are quiet, mature income from a field that has been producing for close to a century. Value here depends on your decimal, the performance of the specific leases or units you are paid on, and whether injection is still being maintained. Title in this county frequently runs back to nineteenth-century German and Czech family farms and has been divided repeatedly through inheritance, so undivided fractional interests and unrecorded probates are the norm. We buy minerals and royalties in Austin County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
The Handbook of Texas dates the opening of the field to 1927, noting that petroleum was first discovered in Austin County in 1915 but that commercial production did not begin until Raccoon Bend came in northeast of Bellville. Other sources occasionally give 1928, which likely reflects the pace of development rather than the discovery itself.
Activity here has been modest for years, and the county is far from the main horizontal plays. Most work at Raccoon Bend is maintenance of existing wells and injection rather than new drilling. Any offer that prices your interest on the assumption of new development in this county should be treated skeptically and checked against actual permit records.
Collect the deed that put the interest in the family and every probate, will and division since. Where a probate was never filed, an affidavit of heirship recorded in Austin County is often the practical fix, though the operator decides what it will accept. We handle this kind of curative work on interests we purchase, at our expense, and can tell you what is missing before you spend anything.