Sell Mineral Rights in North Dakota

A Bakken royalty check today rarely looks like the check from two years ago, and that decline curve is the single most important input in this calculator.

North Dakota's Williston Basin counties - McKenzie, Mountrail, Williams, Dunn - run on horizontal Bakken and Three Forks wells that behave in a very specific, well-documented way: a steep production spike in the first year or two, followed by a long, gradually flattening decline that can stretch on for a decade or more at a much lower rate. If you own minerals under a producing unit here, where your well sits on that curve right now matters as much as how much oil it made in its best month.

That's the core idea driving how our calculator scores this state. A newer well still in its early decline gets valued differently than an older well that's settled into its long, flat tail, even if this month's check happens to look similar.

Reading the decline curve into your input numbers

The most useful thing you can enter isn't a single month's royalty check, it's a run of six to twelve months of statements, because that run shows the tool whether your well is still declining steeply, has started to flatten, or has been stable for a while. A single high month right after a well comes online can badly overstate long-run value if it's mistaken for the new normal, and a single low month during a workover or shut-in can understate it just as badly.

If you don't have statements handy, county and operator, plus the well's approximate first production date, let the calculator apply a standard Bakken-type decline profile instead - less precise than your own data, but far better than treating a young well like a mature one.

Why McKenzie County pricing differs from the basin edges

McKenzie County, seat Watford City, sits in the thickest, most consistently productive part of the play, and comparable sales there have historically supported some of the strongest per-acre pricing in the state. Move toward the basin's edges - parts of Dunn, Divide, or Burke County - and well productivity gets more variable, which widens the calculator's range because the underlying production data is less consistent from section to section.

Spacing units matter too: North Dakota has seen increasingly dense multi-well pad development, meaning your minerals can sit under more than one horizontal wellbore stacked at different depths. Enter each well separately if you can - combining several wells' income into one guess tends to blur the picture rather than sharpen it.

What buyers are actually pricing when they make an offer

A buyer offer on Bakken minerals is, in effect, a bet on how much oil remains to be produced discounted back to today's dollars, adjusted for commodity price risk and the operator's track record of keeping wells online rather than shutting in low-producing ones. That's why two offers on the same acreage can differ meaningfully even when both buyers saw the same royalty statements - they're making different assumptions about future decline and future price, and neither assumption is provably right.

Use the calculator's range as a sanity check against any offer you receive, not as a floor you should expect every buyer to meet or beat. We buy minerals ourselves and have every incentive to lowball a number here, so we've built the tool to hedge honestly rather than flatter.

If you're comparing multiple offers, ask each buyer what decline assumption and price deck they used, since a wide spread between offers on the same acreage usually traces back to a disagreement over one of those two assumptions rather than a difference in the underlying facts.