Sell Mineral Rights in Shelby County, Texas

Ask anyone in the gas business about the Shelby Trough and they will know exactly what you mean. It is named for this county, and it is the reason a place with no oil history became one of the most technically demanding gas plays in North America.

Timber, cattle, and not much else

Shelby County missed every boom. The 1866 discovery was in Nacogdoches County. The 1930 field was a hundred miles north. What Shelby had was pine, pasture, and the town of Center, and scattered shallow production that never amounted to a county-defining industry.

The trough

The Haynesville shale was deposited across what is now East Texas and north Louisiana in the Jurassic, and the salt basin underneath it means it does not lie level. Along the southern edge it plunges, deeper, hotter, and under far higher pressure than the core of the play. Geologists call that southern deep extension the Shelby Trough.

High pressure is a problem and an opportunity at the same time. It makes wells expensive and difficult. It also means enormous gas volumes in place.

2008 and the long wait

Chesapeake announced the Haynesville in March 2008 after two years of quiet exploratory drilling, and the leasing rush that followed was one of the largest in modern American history. Activity peaked in 2011 at 1,231 wells across the play.

Then gas went to two dollars, capital rotated into oil, and the Haynesville went quiet through 2016. The deepest, most expensive part of the play, this county's part, was the last thing anyone was going to drill.

What brought it back

Two things. Laterals got longer, approaching two miles, which spreads the cost of an expensive vertical section across far more producing rock. And the Gulf Coast built LNG export terminals, six operating by 2024, which put a floor under gas demand within pipeline distance of this county.

Haynesville production is now above its 2011 peak. XTO Energy, Adamas Energy and Aethon are the operators filing here.

What to know if you own here

• Units are large and wells are few. A Shelby Trough unit can cover hundreds of acres and be developed with a handful of very expensive wells. Your decimal may be small but the production behind it is not.
• Ownership tends to be simpler than in the old-field counties. No 1931 leasing frenzy means fewer overlapping fractional interests and cleaner chains.
• Flush production is the trap. A new Haynesville well makes enormous gas in year one and declines steeply. An offer priced off your first-year checks is priced off the best months this well will ever have.