Historic Oil Field
SACROC — the Scurry Area Canyon Reef Operators Committee unit covering the Kelly-Snyder field near Snyder, Texas — is the birthplace of large-scale CO2 enhanced oil recovery in the United States. CO2 injection began here in 1972 and continues today, making it the longest continuously operated CO2 flood in the country. The unit still reports on the order of fourteen million barrels of oil a year, an extraordinary figure for a field discovered in 1948.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 48583001. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
The Kelly-Snyder field was discovered in November 1948, touching off one of the last great conventional oil booms in Texas — Scurry County’s population exploded as the Canyon Reef play proved up billions of barrels of oil in place. By 1953 the field’s operators had formed the Scurry Area Canyon Reef Operators Committee and unitized the field, at the time one of the largest unitization efforts ever undertaken, so that pressure maintenance could be engineered field-wide rather than lease by lease.
Water injection began almost immediately after unitization to arrest the reservoir’s rapid pressure decline. Then, in January 1972, the unit began injecting carbon dioxide — a pioneering step that made SACROC the proving ground for CO2 miscible flooding in America. The early CO2 came from natural gas processing plants in the Val Verde Basin, delivered through one of the first long-distance CO2 pipelines ever built.
Kinder Morgan acquired its operating interest in SACROC around 2000 and has continued to invest in the flood since, tying the unit into the broader Permian CO2 infrastructure that also serves Yates and other Central Basin Platform projects. SACROC is also closely studied as a natural laboratory for long-term geologic CO2 storage — more than half a century of injection gives it the longest CO2 monitoring record in the country.
SACROC produces from the Pennsylvanian-age Canyon Reef — a massive limestone reef complex running roughly north-south under Scurry County at depths around 6,700 feet. Reef carbonates of this scale are rare onshore in the US; the structure’s thickness (several hundred feet of productive section in places) is what supported both the original boom and the decades of flood response since. The reef’s heterogeneity is also why the unit has needed continuous engineering attention — and continuous capital — to keep sweep efficiency improving.
CO2 miscible flooding works by injecting carbon dioxide that mixes with (rather than merely pushes) the oil left behind after waterflooding, swelling it and stripping it out of pore space water cannot reach. At SACROC that has meant recovering hundreds of millions of barrels that primary and waterflood recovery would have stranded. For mineral owners the practical consequence is simple: royalty checks that would have dwindled to stripper levels by the 1980s instead continue at scale five decades later, backed by an operator with a pipeline network and a long-term commitment to the flood.
SACROC royalty interests are among the most distinctive in Texas: long-lived, flood-supported production with half a century of operating history behind the forecast. Interests here are often held by heirs several generations removed from the original lessors — title work, suspense funds, and unclaimed royalties are common. We buy SACROC and Kelly-Snyder area minerals and royalties directly, handle the title complexity at our expense, and can walk you through how a CO2 flood’s long tail translates into present value.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Scurry Area Canyon Reef Operators Committee — the operators’ group formed in 1953 to unitize the Kelly-Snyder field so pressure maintenance and, later, CO2 flooding could be run field-wide. The name now refers to the unit itself.
Yes — the unit still reports on the order of fourteen million barrels of oil a year to the Texas Railroad Commission, sustained by the CO2 flood that has run continuously since 1972.
Your division orders, royalty check stubs, or the original lease’s legal description (section, block, and survey in Scurry or Kent County) will place the tract. If you send us the legal description or a check stub, we can identify the unit and leases involved and give you a free written offer on the interest.
Injection sustains the production your royalty is paid on — that is the entire point of the flood. The specifics of how costs are handled depend on your lease terms, but the dominant effect for SACROC royalty owners has been decades of additional paying production that would not have existed without CO2.