Truax Field sits in Williams County, North Dakota, east of Williston in the part of the basin where the Bakken section thickens toward the McKenzie County core. It belongs entirely to the horizontal era, designated as an administrative field as development pushed north and west from the original Mountrail County discoveries in 2008. Owners here hold Middle Bakken and Three Forks interests with the production behavior common to the whole play: very strong early volumes followed by a long, much thinner tail.
Williams County had produced oil since the Clarence Iverson discovery of 1951, but that production came from Devonian and Madison carbonates trapped on the Nesson Anticline. Most of the county away from that structure had little to show for decades of intermittent drilling. The Bakken changed that arithmetic entirely, because the target is not a structural trap at all but a continuous tight reservoir that produces wherever a horizontal well can be fractured into it.
Development around Truax began in earnest in 2008 and 2009 and continued through the following decade in waves that tracked the price of oil. Early wells were single-well spacing units with one-mile laterals. Later drilling used multi-well pads, two-mile laterals, larger proppant volumes, and Three Forks targets beneath the original Middle Bakken wellbores. The city of Williston absorbed the resulting boom, and the county became one of the most heavily drilled in the state.
Positions in the area have changed hands repeatedly through Williston Basin consolidation, including the 2022 combination of Whiting Petroleum and Oasis Petroleum into Chord Energy and Chord’s combination with Enerplus in 2024. Mineral owners should expect operator names to rotate on division orders. Those changes are corporate transactions and do not alter the decimal interest, the lease, or the royalty obligations attached to the tract.
Truax lies where the Bakken petroleum system sits at roughly 9,500 to 10,500 feet in Williams County, transitioning toward the deeper, more overpressured core to the south. The Middle Bakken is a tight dolomitic siltstone bounded by the organic-rich Upper and Lower Bakken shales that sourced its oil, with Three Forks dolomite benches beneath. None of it flows without long horizontal wellbores and multi-stage fracturing. Reservoir quality generally improves toward the basin center, so performance varies across the field.
No injection program operates at Truax. Additional recovery in a Bakken field comes from more wellbores rather than injected fluid — infill wells, additional Three Forks benches, longer laterals, and refracs of older completions built with far less proppant than current designs. Recovery of the original oil in place remains low by conventional standards. Basin-wide gas injection pilots have been trialed to raise that figure, but drilling remains the practical mechanism for adding barrels.
Williams County interests span a wide range of quality depending on how close a tract sits to the deeper basin center, so per-acre values here are less uniform than in the McKenzie County core. Remaining undrilled Middle Bakken and Three Forks locations usually drive the number more than existing production does. Older Williams County families frequently hold both legacy conventional interests and modern Bakken interests. We buy minerals and royalties in Williams County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Almost entirely. Conventional Madison and Devonian production in the county came from waterflooded carbonates that decline slowly over decades. A horizontal Bakken well pays most of what it will ever pay in its first few years. Owners who hold both often find the two streams behave nothing alike from one year to the next.
Yes. Selling minerals and leasing them are different transactions, and it is possible to sell part of an interest while keeping the rest, or to sell royalty on producing wells while retaining executive rights. What makes sense depends on your goals. We will lay out the options in writing before anything is signed.
A legal description of the tract or a recent royalty check stub is usually enough to start. Deeds, probate records, and prior division orders help confirm the decimal interest. We run title ourselves at no cost to you and return a free written offer once the interest is confirmed.