Everything in the Permian Basin starts here. Three years before Santa Rita No. 1 made Reagan County famous, a well two miles northwest of the town of Westbrook was shot with nitroglycerin in front of a crowd of two thousand people and blew oil nearly to the top of the derrick. The Texas Historical Commission marks it as the first commercial discovery oil well in the Permian Basin. The field went on to produce more than 100 million barrels — roughly two thirds of it attributable to waterflooding rather than primary recovery.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 96563001, 96565500, 96563500, 96563525, 96570500. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
The Texas & Pacific No. 1, better known as the W. H. Abrams No. 1 after the Texas and Pacific Land Trust leasing agent it was named for, was spudded early in 1920 under wildcat driller Steve Owens. Oil showed at 450 feet in February and a better show came in June between 2,345 and 2,410 feet. On July 16, 1920 the well was shot with nitroglycerin before a crowd of roughly two thousand; it flowed 129 barrels a day and settled back to about twenty.
Commercial oil and a commercial market are not the same thing, and Westbrook needed both. There was no outlet for the crude until H. L. Lockhart and Rio Grande Oil built the first commercial pipeline in the Permian Basin, with the first load moving on April 3, 1922. Historical accounts disagree by a year on when the field crossed the commercial threshold — the state historical marker credits the 1920 Abrams well, while the Texas State Historical Association dates the first commercial Permian well to 1921 at 2,498 feet in Mitchell County.
Westbrook grew to roughly six miles long and two miles wide and touched off development of twenty-one other small fields in Mitchell County, which has produced more than 175 million barrels in total. The discovery well itself had a second career: on May 1, 1968 it was redesignated as Westbrook Southeast Unit No. 701 and put to work in the waterflood. The field is now operated in several units, and operatorship varies by unit rather than being held field-wide by one company.
Westbrook produces from the Permian Clear Fork, and that is precisely why the field mattered to geologists in 1920. Before Westbrook, Permian strata were not seriously considered oil-producing rock in West Texas; a 1927 AAPG Bulletin paper on the field flagged that reversal explicitly. The pay is a shallow carbonate at depths reachable with the cable tools of the era, and the Railroad Commission carries a Westbrook (Clearfork, Upper) designation. Shallow depth is the field’s enduring advantage: workover and injection costs stay low enough to keep marginal wells economic through price cycles.
Waterflooding is the reason Westbrook is a hundred-million-barrel field rather than a footnote. The state historical marker credits about 67 million of the field’s more than 100 million barrels to waterflood recovery — an unusually explicit public accounting of secondary recovery’s contribution. Units including the Westbrook Southeast and Southwest units carry the injection, with the 1920 discovery well itself converted into unit service in 1968. Modern activity is centered on unit management, workovers and recompletions in the shallow Clear Fork rather than on new field extensions.
Mitchell County royalty interests are among the oldest continuously producing interests in Texas, which means the paperwork is often the hardest part. Century-old leases, undivided fractions split across four or five generations, and unit conversions like the 1968 redesignation of the discovery well all show up in these chains of title. The production itself is shallow, low-decline and flood-supported, which is real value that a raw decline curve tends to understate. We buy minerals and royalties in Mitchell County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
If the tract has produced continuously, yes — most Texas oil and gas leases are held by production for as long as production continues in paying quantities, and many Westbrook leases have never lapsed. That also means your royalty terms are whatever that original lease says, which is often a straight one-eighth. Old lease terms do not reduce the interest’s value; they simply need to be read before pricing it.
Often yes, but the title has to be cured first. In Texas, affidavits of heirship, small estate procedures or a muniment of title will handle many situations without full administration. We look at the chain, tell you specifically what is missing, and give you a realistic sense of cost and timeline before you commit to anything.
Because shallow Clear Fork waterflood production declines very slowly and costs relatively little to lift. A stream that pays modest amounts for another two or three decades has real present value, and it is far more predictable than a new horizontal well. The valuation question is not whether it is worth something, but which discount rate and decline profile fairly reflect it.