The Salt Creek Field in Kent County, Texas (not to be confused with Wyoming’s Salt Creek) is another jewel of the Horseshoe Atoll — a Pennsylvanian Canyon Reef accumulation discovered in 1950 that has spent the last several decades under miscible CO2 flood. It still reports roughly a million and a half barrels of oil a year, and its royalty base is the familiar Atoll mix of unitized payments and inherited fractional interests.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 79887001. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Salt Creek was discovered in 1950 as the Horseshoe Atoll play matured, and like its reef siblings it moved quickly from boom-rate primary production to engineered pressure maintenance — the reef’s limited natural drive made unitization and water injection an operational necessity rather than a choice.
A miscible CO2 flood was implemented in the 1990s, later than SACROC’s pioneering 1972 start but with the benefit of two additional decades of flood science. The project has been documented as one of the more efficient Canyon Reef floods, with strong incremental recovery per ton of CO2 injected. Operatorship has passed among majors and large independents over the decades, most recently within the group of specialist CO2 operators consolidating Permian EOR assets.
Like every Atoll field, Salt Creek’s modern footprint is compact — a short list of large unit leases — while its mineral ownership is anything but, spread across generations of heirs to the ranch families who signed the original leases.
Salt Creek produces from Canyon Reef limestone at roughly 6,300 feet, a compact, high-quality reef buildup on the Horseshoe Atoll arc. The rock’s porosity and continuity are what made a 1950 discovery a viable CO2 flood candidate four decades later: miscible CO2 needs reservoir quality to sweep efficiently, and the Atoll reefs deliver it.
The Salt Creek CO2 flood shows the second-generation version of what SACROC pioneered: better pattern design, better conformance control, and higher utilization per ton of CO2. The flood added decades of field life and continues to support production today. For royalty owners the practical read-through is the same as across the Atoll: these are long-tail assets whose value sits in years no simple decline curve would predict.
Salt Creek royalties are classic specialist assets — unitized, flood-supported, and small enough that generalist buyers rarely price them well. We buy Kent and Scurry County minerals and royalties directly, including Salt Creek unit interests, and back our written offers with the field’s actual RRC production history rather than an acreage rule of thumb.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
No — Texas’s Salt Creek Field is a Canyon Reef CO2 flood in Kent County on the Horseshoe Atoll. Wyoming’s Salt Creek is an unrelated historic field near Casper. Ours is the one relevant to Kent and Scurry County mineral owners.
Yes — the field still reports roughly 1.5 million barrels of oil a year to the Texas Railroad Commission, supported by the miscible CO2 flood implemented in the 1990s.
The process is the same as any mineral sale — a deed conveying your interest — but pricing it correctly requires unit-level production analysis. Send us a check stub or division order and we will identify your unit tract and provide a free written offer.