The Welch Field produces shallow San Andres oil in Dawson County, on the shelf northeast of the Central Basin Platform, and has made roughly 169 million barrels since the early 1940s. It matters out of proportion to its size because operators have used it as a laboratory: a documented pilot waterflood in 1955, a CO2 pilot at the South Welch Unit in the 1980s, and a federal demonstration project applying 3-D seismic and crosswell tomography to map porosity between wells. Few mature fields have this much of their engineering history in the public record.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 96062001, 96068666, 96068333. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Dawson County oil development dates to 1934, and the Welch Field itself was discovered in the early 1940s — Railroad Commission reservoir records carry 1941, while the Texas Almanac lists 1942, and federal reports simply say the early 1940s. The discovery well is not documented in readily available sources. By 1946 twenty-eight wells were producing, and Ralph Frank Lowe was among those who developed Welch Field properties between 1943 and 1962, building a substantial West Texas position from them.
Secondary recovery arrived early and was reported carefully. A pilot waterflood was initiated in 1955 on a single forty-acre five-spot — four producers converted to injection around a center producer — and its performance was published in the Journal of Petroleum Technology in 1961. Field-wide waterflooding followed around 1965, and by the mid-1990s the flood had been running roughly thirty years. The field was eventually organized into four large waterflood units: Welch (San Andres), North Welch, South Welch and West Welch.
Tertiary recovery came next. A CO2 pilot ran at the South Welch Unit from 1982 to 1986 with positive results, and once a CO2 pipeline reached the field, phased miscible development followed at South Welch. In the 1990s the field hosted a Department of Energy Class II demonstration project in which operators tied three seismic attributes to porosity and used them to guide infill drilling — seismic-based porosity estimates landed within one porosity unit of the logs in ten new wells, adding roughly 300,000 barrels of reserves in the West Welch Unit.
Welch produces from San Andres dolomite with pay around 4,800 to 5,000 feet, deposited in an arid nearshore sabkha setting as four upward-shallowing carbonate cycles sealed by supratidal anhydrite and anhydritic dolomite. The primary drive was solution gas. Reservoir quality is modest — this is one of the lower-quality shallow shelf carbonates studied under federal reservoir characterization programs — which is exactly why the seismic and tomography work was done here: in rock this heterogeneous, knowing where porosity sits between wells is worth real money.
Welch has been through the full sequence. Solution-gas primary drive gave way to a 1955 pilot waterflood, then field-wide flooding from about 1965, then infill drilling to twenty-acre density across large portions of the field. The South Welch Unit CO2 pilot ran 1982 to 1986, and once pipeline CO2 was available, phased miscible CO2 development proceeded there. Occidental has been the operator long associated with the South Welch Unit. Each phase extended field life well past what the previous one would have supported on its own.
Welch is divided into four large waterflood units, so the practical question for an owner is which unit and which tract factor, and whether that unit is under waterflood or under CO2 — the two carry very different remaining-life profiles. Twenty-acre infill and seismic-guided drilling have repeatedly added reserves here after buyers assumed the tract had flattened. Interests supported by an active tertiary program deserve a method-aware valuation. We buy minerals and royalties in Dawson County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Not necessarily. Miscible CO2 development at Welch has been centered on the South Welch Unit, while other units have remained waterfloods. Your division order names the unit that pays you, and that determines which recovery program applies to your interest. It is a meaningful distinction, because a CO2 unit and a waterflood unit at the same field will not decline at the same rate.
Tighter spacing puts wells into rock that wider patterns did not drain, and at Welch that has been guided by seismic porosity mapping rather than by drilling on a grid. For a royalty owner in the unit, additional unit production flows through your tract factor. The effect is usually a bump followed by a slower decline rather than a dramatic step change.
A recent check stub or division order, whatever deed or probate documents you have, and identification are enough to start. We pull the county records and Railroad Commission data ourselves and tell you what we find, including anything that needs curing. There is no charge for the review and no obligation attached to receiving a written offer.