Toborg is a shallow heavy-oil field in Pecos County, on the southern rim of the Permian Basin where the Cretaceous section thickens toward the Val Verde Basin. It is a smaller and far less celebrated field than the Yates giant to the north, and it belongs to a later generation of Pecos County development. Production comes from shallow Cretaceous sands carrying viscous oil, which is why the field has been worked with injection at modest rates rather than developed for high volumes.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 90286001. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Pecos County is one of the great oil counties of Texas, but its reputation rests almost entirely on a single discovery. The Yates field opened in 1927 and was among the largest in the nation at the time, causing a boom that put towns like Iraan on the map by 1930. By 1948 the county was pumping 22,579,000 barrels a year, and in 1952 the largest gas field in the county was opened on the M. C. Puckett and Son Ranch south of Fort Stockton. Everything else in the county has lived in Yates’s shadow.
The 1950s brought a second wave of exploration as new petroleum and natural gas discoveries helped the county economy grow. Toborg belongs to that later phase, when operators were testing shallower and less obvious targets across a county that had been mapped and leased for thirty years. Shallow heavy oil of the kind found here presents a very different commercial problem from the Yates field: the oil is present in quantity but flows reluctantly, and the reservoir gives it up only with pressure support.
Pecos County peaked long ago. By 1982 the county produced 50,472,709 barrels of crude and 274,741,143,000 cubic feet of gas-well gas, and oil output dropped to 31,994,000 barrels by 1989. By January 1, 1991 the county had produced almost 1,505,424,000 barrels since 1926. Toborg is a small contributor to that total and should be described honestly as a modest field: low rate, long lived, and dependent on cheap operations and disciplined injection rather than on any expectation of expansion.
Toborg produces from shallow Cretaceous sands on the southern margin of the Permian Basin, where the section thickens toward the Val Verde Basin and is structurally disturbed by the Marathon thrust front to the south. The oil here is heavy and viscous compared with the light crude of the Central Basin Platform, which changes everything about how the reservoir performs: it flows slowly at reservoir temperature, it does not readily give up its oil to natural pressure decline, and it requires either pressure support or, in other regions, heat to move at commercial rates.
Water injection provides the pressure support at Toborg. In a shallow viscous-oil reservoir, water is much more mobile than the oil it is meant to displace, so injected water tends to finger through and leave a great deal of oil behind, and recovery factors in fields of this type are correspondingly modest. Shallow depth is the saving grace: wells are cheap to drill and cheap to rework, so low rates remain economic. Owners should treat this as a small, durable property rather than one with meaningful remaining upside.
Pecos County mineral ownership can mean very different things depending on where a tract sits. Shallow heavy-oil interests like Toborg produce small, steady income valued on durability, while tracts in the Delaware Basin portion of the county have been leased and drilled horizontally on entirely different economics. Blending the two into one number is the most common valuation error we see here. Knowing which side of the county your minerals are on comes first. We buy minerals and royalties in Pecos County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Because it costs more to produce, transport and refine. Heavy crude sells at a discount to light benchmark grades, and viscous oil takes more energy and equipment to lift and move. That discount flows straight through to royalty, so a heavy-oil royalty on the same volume is worth materially less than a light-oil royalty in the same county.
It depends entirely on location and depth. Pecos County spans several distinct settings, and the horizontal Wolfcamp and Bone Spring activity is concentrated in specific areas well away from the shallow southern fields. Your legal description and your leases will tell you. Do not assume a Pecos County address implies exposure to the shale play.
From the production record of the specific leases rather than from field-level generalities. Railroad Commission data shows what each lease has produced month by month, which gives a real decline curve. We combine that with your decimal, current pricing for the crude grade involved, and the operator’s recent behavior, and we show you the arithmetic in the written offer.