The Slaughter Field is one of the largest oil accumulations in Texas by sheer area — a San Andres trend sprawling across more than a hundred thousand acres of Hockley, Cochran, and Terry counties. Discovered in 1936 on the Slaughter ranch lands, it was developed as dozens of separate units that have been waterflooded since the 1950s and CO2-flooded in parts since the 1980s and 1990s. The field still reports millions of barrels of oil a year across roughly eighty active leases and units.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 83991001, 83991400. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Discovery came in 1936 on the vast C.C. Slaughter ranch holdings southwest of Lubbock, and the trend grew through the 1940s until it merged geologically with the Levelland field to the north — together forming one of the great shallow-shelf carbonate complexes of the Permian Basin. Thousands of wells were drilled on close spacing across the South Plains farm country.
Because the field was developed under many separate leases and operators, its secondary-recovery era unfolded as a patchwork of unitizations from the 1950s onward — dozens of named units, each with its own waterflood. CO2 flooding arrived in stages beginning in the 1980s, with projects such as the Central Mallet Unit becoming well-documented examples of San Andres CO2 performance on the Northwest Shelf.
That structure persists today: Slaughter is not one project but a mosaic of legacy floods in various stages of maturity, operated by a mix of majors’ successors and specialist EOR operators. It is a field where two adjacent tracts can have meaningfully different royalty outlooks depending on which unit — and which flood vintage — each sits in.
Production comes from the Permian San Andres dolomite at roughly 4,800 to 5,200 feet along a shelf-margin trend. The pay is relatively thin but extraordinarily widespread — the geometry that made Slaughter a field of thousands of modest wells rather than hundreds of great ones. Recovery therefore lives and dies on flood management: pattern design, injection conformance, and infill drilling have mattered more here than any single well ever did.
Slaughter’s EOR story is cumulative rather than singular: seventy years of waterflooding, followed by CO2 projects where economics justified them, unit by unit. The result is a long, engineered plateau — units that would have watered out in the 1960s still paying royalties in the 2020s. For owners, the unit-by-unit structure cuts both ways: some interests sit in revitalized CO2 patterns with decades of visible life, others in late-stage waterfloods managed for harvest.
Valuing Slaughter-area minerals means knowing which unit, which flood, and which operator — a generic price-per-acre misses the field’s defining feature. We buy minerals and royalties across Hockley, Cochran, and Terry counties and price each interest against its actual unit performance in the RRC data. If you are not sure which unit your inherited interest pays from, send us a check stub and we will identify it for you as part of a free written offer.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Because the field is a mosaic of dozens of separately unitized floods of different vintages and recovery methods. A tract in an active CO2 pattern and a tract in a late-stage waterflood two miles away can pay very differently. Your division order or check stub identifies which unit your interest sits in.
Geologically they are part of the same San Andres shelf trend and effectively merge; regulatory field designations keep them separate. Together they form one of the largest carbonate oil complexes in the Permian Basin.
Yes — fragmented, multi-generation interests are the norm in this field, not the exception. We handle heirship documentation and title work at our expense and make firm written offers on interests of any size.