The Yates Field in Pecos County, Texas is one of the most storied oil fields in America — a shallow San Andres giant discovered on Ira Yates’ sheep ranch in 1926 that has now produced for a century and still reports millions of barrels of oil a year. For mineral owners, Yates is the clearest example of what enhanced oil recovery means for a royalty stream: a field that would have been "depleted" decades ago under primary recovery instead remains one of the most productive conventional assets in the Permian Basin.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 99295001. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Transcontinental Oil and Mid-Kansas Oil & Gas completed the discovery well on the Yates ranch in October 1926, finding oil at unusually shallow depth on what became known as the Central Basin Platform. Early wells were spectacular — the field quickly proved so prolific that it helped force the first proration (production-limiting) orders in Texas, a regulatory framework that shaped the entire American oil industry.
The field’s original oil in place is measured in the billions of barrels, concentrated in a fractured San Andres dolomite reservoir with a strong gravity-drainage mechanism: oil drains downward through the fracture network toward wellbores as the gas cap expands above it. Operators learned to manage the field around that mechanism rather than against it, keeping per-well rates modest and recovery efficiency among the highest of any major carbonate field in the world.
Marathon Oil operated Yates for most of the modern era before Kinder Morgan acquired the field in 2003 and expanded a CO2 injection program alongside the traditional gravity-drainage management. A century after discovery, the field’s remaining reserves are still material — a longevity almost no other 1920s discovery can claim.
Yates produces primarily from the San Andres dolomite at depths of roughly 1,000 to 1,500 feet — remarkably shallow for a field of its size. The reservoir is intensely fractured, giving it exceptional permeability and allowing gravity drainage to work as the dominant recovery mechanism. Secondary pays include the Grayburg and Queen. The shallow depth keeps drilling and workover costs low, which is a major reason the field has stayed continuously economic through every price cycle since the 1920s.
Yates is a textbook case of squeezing more from a giant: decades of careful gas-cap and pressure management, horizontal wells drilled into the oil column starting in the 1990s, and CO2 injection expanded under Kinder Morgan’s ownership to sweep oil the fractures would otherwise strand. The result is a recovery factor far above the industry average for carbonate fields. For royalty owners, each phase of investment has translated into decades of additional royalty life that primary recovery alone would never have delivered.
Yates royalty interests behave differently from shale royalties: instead of a steep first-year decline, the field produces a comparatively flat, long-lived stream backed by a century of operating history and continued EOR investment. That stability is valuable — but it also means the market for these interests is specialized, and offers can vary widely depending on how a buyer models remaining EOR performance. If you own minerals or royalties in the Yates Field or elsewhere in Pecos County, we buy them directly and will walk you through exactly how we value the remaining life.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
Yes. Nearly a century after its 1926 discovery, the Yates Field still reports millions of barrels of oil per year to the Texas Railroad Commission, sustained by gravity drainage, horizontal wells, and CO2 injection. It remains one of the most productive conventional fields in the Permian Basin.
Kinder Morgan acquired the Yates Field from Marathon Oil in 2003 and has operated it since, running CO2 injection alongside the field’s traditional gravity-drainage management.
Value depends on your decimal interest, which leases your tract sits under, and how a buyer models the field’s long, flat EOR-supported production tail. Long-lived, low-decline royalty streams like Yates are valued differently from shale interests — request a free written offer and we will show you the math on your specific interest.