Sell Mineral Rights in Panola County, Texas

Panola County has been producing hydrocarbons for more than a century, and it is the rare East Texas county whose most important chapter is about gas rather than oil. The field under Carthage became one of the largest in the United States, and its name is stamped on drilling permits seventy miles away to this day.

Early oil, then a long wait

Oil was found in Panola County in 1917 and gas in 1936. Neither amounted to much at first. The county was farming and timber country, losing population, and the discoveries a hundred miles northwest in the East Texas Field took every dollar of attention the region had.

1944: the Jordan well

Everything changed when the Jordan well was drilled a mile west of Carthage in 1944. It found a reservoir that underlay nearly half the county.

That became the Carthage field, and it reversed the county's decline. Population stopped falling. Oil production climbed from 322,000 barrels in 1948 to 1,057,000 in 1956 to 3,816,000 barrels in 1963.

The gas is the bigger story

The oil numbers understate what happened here, because Carthage's importance was always gas, the Cotton Valley sands, and the Travis Peak above them.

Cotton Valley is tight rock. For decades it was known to hold enormous gas volumes that nobody could produce at a profit. What unlocked it was not a discovery but economics and technique, gas prices rising through the late 1970s and 1980s and hydraulic fracturing improving in parallel. Operators went back into a field that had been drilled since the forties and produced it all over again from a formation they had previously drilled straight through.

That pattern, a known formation becoming economic decades later, is worth holding onto. It is exactly what happened again with the Haynesville underneath.

Three producing horizons, one tract

Panola County is the clearest example in the district of stacked ownership. A single tract here can have Travis Peak production from one era, Cotton Valley from another, and Haynesville from a third, each under different leases, sometimes with different operators, sometimes with the deep rights severed and sometimes not.

Cumulative oil production passed 92.2 million barrels by 2004 with nearly 1.95 million barrels in that year alone. TGNR, backed by Tokyo Gas and Castleton, is running multi-well Haynesville pads here now.

The field name that outlived its geography

The Railroad Commission still writes "Carthage (Haynesville Shale)" on permits for wells in Angelina County, seventy miles south. A field designation from Panola County has become the administrative label for an entire play. If you ever wonder why a permit near Huntington says Carthage on it, that is why.

What to know if you own here

• Ask which formation your check is from. With three producing horizons, "I get a royalty in Panola County" is not a complete description of what you own.
• Check whether the deep is severed. Cotton Valley leases from the eighties may or may not reach the Haynesville. This is where the money is.
• A hundred years of production means a lot of division. Interests here have had since 1917 to fractionate.