What Are Mineral Rights Worth?

There is no single number for what mineral rights are worth in the Bakken. There's a range, and where your acres fall in that range comes down to a handful of engineering facts, not a formula anyone can hand you over the phone.

We get asked this question more than any other, usually in the first thirty seconds of a call: what's it worth? We can tell you the honest answer is that value is built from several layers, and most of the sales that go sideways happen because the seller only looked at one of them — usually whatever number a neighbor mentioned at a coffee shop years ago.

This isn't an appraisal, and nobody honest is going to promise you a fixed number without looking at your specific tract. But we can walk you through the same factors we'd walk through pricing an interest for ourselves, so you know what's actually driving the number when an offer lands in your mailbox.

Core Versus Flank Is the First Split

The Bakken and Three Forks aren't uniform. The core of the play sits in McKenzie, Mountrail, and Dunn counties, where the pay zones are thickest, the rock is most consistently productive, and operators have drilled multiple stacked laterals per section for over a decade. Acreage there commands a premium because the production history is deep and the risk of a dry or marginal well is lower. Move out to the flank — parts of Williams and Divide counties on the North Dakota side, or across into Richland and Roosevelt counties in Montana — and you're in areas where the formation thins, well results are more variable, and operators have historically drilled fewer wells per section, sometimes none at all on a given tract.

None of that means flank acreage is worthless. It means the value curve is different, and a buyer pricing flank minerals is weighting undeveloped, unproven acreage differently than they'd weight a producing unit in the core. We've seen sellers get frustrated comparing an offer on their Divide County tract to a cousin's check from a McKenzie County unit — they're not the same asset, even if the county line makes it feel that way.

Producing vs. Non-Producing Changes the Math Entirely

If your minerals sit under an existing producing well, the buyer has real cash flow to underwrite against — your trailing royalty history, the well's position on its decline curve, and current commodity pricing. That's a very different exercise from pricing undeveloped minerals with no wellbore yet, where the value is almost entirely speculative and tied to whether an operator has filed a permit or holds an active spacing unit nearby. Undeveloped core acreage can still carry real value on the expectation of future drilling, but it trades at a discount to producing acreage because there's no royalty stream to point to yet.

Spacing and downspacing matter here too. A unit that's already got three or four wellbores producing has less room left for future infill drilling than one with a single older well, and that affects how a buyer weighs future upside against what's currently on the books.

How the Royalty Rate and Decimal Interest Play In

Two tracts of identical acreage can be worth different amounts because of the royalty rate carried in the original lease. Older Bakken-era leases from the first drilling wave sometimes carry a 1/8 or 3/16 royalty; more recent leases in competitive areas have gone higher. Your decimal interest — the fraction of well production actually credited to you — is the number that turns county-level generalities into a dollar figure specific to your acres, and it's calculated from your net mineral acres, your royalty rate, and the spacing unit size.

Depending on activity and current market conditions, buyers typically quote offers as a multiple of trailing royalty income for producing interests, or as a per-acre figure for undeveloped ground that varies with proximity to recent permits and offset well results. Either way, the number moves with real, checkable inputs — it isn't a flat statewide rate.

What we'd Tell a Family Member Before They Sign Anything

Pull your division order and your last two years of statements if you have production, or your lease and county plat if you don't. Know which county and which side of the play line you're on. And get more than one number before you decide — not because every buyer is trying to lowball you, but because pricing genuinely varies with how each buyer weighs core position, decline stage, and current commodity pricing. A second opinion costs you nothing and tells you a lot.