Sell Mineral Rights in San Augustine County, Texas

San Augustine has almost no oil history. Every map of the great East Texas discoveries leaves it blank. That absence is not a footnote, it is the single most important fact about mineral ownership in this county.

One of the oldest towns in Texas, and none of the oil

San Augustine sits on the old Spanish road, El Camino Real, and is among the oldest Anglo settlements in the state. It had a courthouse and a college when most of East Texas was still timber.

What it did not have was oil. When Lyne Barret drilled the state's first well in 1866, it was a few dozen miles west of here. When the East Texas Field came in 1930 and made Kilgore into a forest of derricks, it was a hundred miles north. The county watched two of the most consequential events in American petroleum history happen to its neighbors.

Why nobody drilled it

Because the target was too deep to reach. The Haynesville shale runs beneath this whole region, but it does not lie flat. It deepens sharply to the south into what the industry calls the Shelby Trough, and underneath San Augustine it sits around sixteen to seventeen thousand feet, in rock hot enough and tight enough that no vertical well could ever have made it pay.

For a century that was the end of the discussion. The rock was known. It was simply unreachable.

2008, and then 2016

Chesapeake Energy began drilling exploratory wells into the Haynesville in 2006 and announced what it had found in March 2008. Horizontal drilling plus modern hydraulic fracturing had turned a formation nobody could produce into one of the largest gas plays in the world, roughly 9,000 square miles across East Texas and north Louisiana.

The first rush went to the shallower core in Louisiana and around Carthage. Then gas prices collapsed and capital left for oil, the Eagle Ford and the Permian, and Haynesville drilling fell sharply from a 2011 peak of 1,231 wells by 2016.

The play came back after 2017 on the strength of two-mile laterals and better completions, and this time the deep, hot, high-pressure southern end was economic. That is San Augustine. Operators are drilling wells here around sixteen to seventeen thousand feet because LNG export demand on the Gulf Coast makes that math work.

Who is here now

Rockcliff Energy Operating III, Aethon Energy Operating, Adamas Energy, EXCO Operating, Apex Natural Gas and BPX Operating have all filed permits or completions in this county. These are not small operators making shallow wells. These are companies spending several million dollars per hole.

What the missing century means for you

This is the part worth understanding if your family owns here.

• Your ownership was never shattered by a boom. In Rusk and Gregg counties, mineral interests were carved up in 1930 and 1931 by people signing lease forms in a frenzy, and were divided again by every generation since. That never happened here. Minerals passed down quietly with the family land.
• Which means the tracts are bigger and the chains are cleaner than anywhere in the old field, and a single owner can hold a meaningful position in a modern unit.
• And it means almost nobody knows what they have. There was no boom to teach three generations of San Augustine families what a royalty is worth. Many of these interests have never been appraised by anyone but the county, never been offered on, and never been explained.

A hundred and fifty quiet years is not evidence that there is nothing underneath you. In this county it is close to the opposite.