Where the Bakken Started: Well Age and Mountrail County, North Dakota Mineral Values
MINERAL RIGHTS & ROYALTIES
What could your mineral rights be worth?
Tell us a little about your interest. Get a free, no-obligation review from Selling My Mineral Rights.
Mountrail County owners usually arrive at the same question from the same direction. The royalty checks used to matter. Now they are small, or they come some months and not others, and the obvious conclusion is that the interest is nearly worthless. Sometimes that is right. More often the owner is reading one number when there are two, because here what decides value is not where the acres sit. It is when the wells under them were drilled.
Mountrail is where the North Dakota Bakken became a real play, and that history still shows in the production reports. It also puts a lot of local interests on the wrong side of a line in the state tax code, drawn at July 1, 2013, that most owners have never heard of.
The Discovery Well Is Shut In
EOG Resources completed the Parshall 1-36H in the southeast corner of Section 36, T153N, R90W for 463 barrels of oil a day, and within two years had field wells averaging almost 1,200 barrels a day on initial test (NDGS Newsletter, Vol. 35 No. 1). In the Industrial Commission’s July 2026 report, that discovery well carries the status “SI” — shut in. Its neighbor, the Parshall 2-36H, made 85 barrels for the month. The Parshall 13-26H, one of the better survivors, made 304.
The same pages show the other half. In the same field, under the same operator, EOG’s Apricot 0332-01H produced 8,217 barrels in 18 days of July — roughly 457 a day — and the Apricot 0328-02H made 7,019 in 27 days, about 260 a day. The old wells carry NDIC file numbers in the 16,000s; the Apricot wells, numbers above 40,000. The rock between them is the same middle Bakken.
Across the whole Parshall–Bakken pool that month, 563 wells produced 537,909 barrels — about 31 barrels per well per day — on only 11,681 of a possible 17,453 well-days. County-wide, Mountrail’s 3,741 producing wells made 5,928,628 preliminary barrels, about 51 barrels per well per day, below McKenzie County’s 66 and the statewide average of 58. Another 473 Mountrail wells were listed as capable of production but made nothing (NDIC Oil and Gas Production Report, July 2026).
Two Stripper Definitions, and the Date That Separates Them
North Dakota exempts low-rate oil wells from its oil extraction tax, and the definitions sit in N.D.C.C. 57-51.1-01. There are two, and which one applies turns on a single date.
- Stripper well property (subsection 11) covers wells drilled and completed, or re-entered and recompleted as a horizontal well, before July 1, 2013. The test runs across a whole property rather than one well: average daily oil per well must not have exceeded 10 barrels at 6,000 feet or less, 15 barrels between 6,000 and 10,000 feet, or 30 barrels deeper than 10,000 feet, in any preceding twelve consecutive months. Wells that did not actually produce that year — shut-in, spent or disposal wells — are not counted as production wells.
- Stripper well (subsection 10) covers wells completed after June 30, 2013 and is applied well by well. The depth tiers match, except a well deeper than 10,000 feet gets 30 barrels a day outside the Bakken and Three Forks and 35 inside them.
For Mountrail that is not academic. The county’s original Bakken development came well before the 2013 cutoff, so those interests fall under the property test and the lower 30-barrel ceiling, with no Bakken carve-out — and the shut-in wells scattered through the Parshall numbers drop out of the average rather than dragging it down. Pull the true vertical depth from the NDIC well file for each well on your tract: wells here are drilled close enough to 10,000 feet that the gap between the 15-barrel and 30-barrel tiers is worth reading, not guessing.
What the Exemption Is Actually Worth
Owners routinely misjudge this. The exemption in 57-51.1-03(2) is from the oil extraction tax only; the 5 percent gross production tax still comes out (ND Office of State Tax Commissioner). A royalty owner on a taxed Bakken property gives up roughly 10 percent of gross value to production taxes; on a certified stripper property, roughly 5 percent. Netting 95 cents on the dollar instead of 90 is about a 5.6 percent improvement — real money, far smaller than the decline that earned it.
It also does not touch gas, taxed at a flat rate per thousand cubic feet reset each June 1 — and Mountrail is oilier than its western neighbors, about 2.6 mcf per barrel in July 2026 against roughly 4.3 in McKenzie. Timing matters too: under 57-51.1-03.1 the certification must reach the tax commissioner within eighteen months after the qualification period ends, or it applies only going forward.
Why a Stripper Certification Can Keep the Refrac Crew Away
The state also offers an incentive aimed squarely at wells like these. Under 57-51.1-03(5), a certified restimulation well pays a reduced 2 percent rate on the first 75,000 barrels or for eighteen months, whichever comes first. A 2008 Parshall-area wellbore looks ideal: 57-51.1-01(8) requires at least sixty months of production and no more than 125 barrels a day before treatment, and these wells clear both easily.
But subsection 8(b) excludes any well that is part of a stripper well or stripper well property. The two incentives do not stack. A property already exempt from the extraction tax gains nothing from a 2 percent rate, which quietly removes one argument for spending money on an old wellbore. Rock quality and service costs decide far more. Still, when an owner asks why nobody has refracked a well making four barrels a day, this belongs in the answer.
Fort Berthold Changes the Arithmetic Again
Part of Mountrail lies inside the Fort Berthold Reservation, which spans portions of McLean, Mountrail, Dunn, McKenzie, Mercer and Ward counties. The restimulation rate reduction does not reach a well inside a reservation’s exterior boundaries, a well on trust property outside them, or a straddle well on reservation trust land, unless the tribe elects in writing to opt in. The 6 percent trigger-price escalation applies only to those same wells. If your tract sits inside the boundary, check which side of the line each well falls on before assuming a statewide rule governs it.
Your Interest Is Two Income Streams, Not One
The first is the tail on the old wellbores. Those wells are far down the hyperbolic curve, so the steep early decline is long behind them and what remains falls slowly. Valuing it is mostly arithmetic: barrels per month, at what price, net of production taxes and whatever post-production costs your lease allows, for how long before lifting costs exceed revenue. It is a modest multiple of current income, modest because the upside is gone.
The second is new-unit drilling, and it almost never shows on your current check. The Apricot wells sit on spacing units laid out for modern laterals, not the 640-acre units EOG used in 2006 and 2007. If a new unit covers your tract, your decimal is your net mineral acres in that unit divided by unit acreage, times your royalty rate — unrelated to the decimal on a division order signed eighteen years ago. That is where the value swing lives, and the piece sellers hand over for nothing.
The contrast with the county to the west is a tax contrast as much as a geological one. Most McKenzie County mineral rights sit above wells drilled after June 30, 2013, putting them under the well-by-well stripper test and its 35-barrel Bakken ceiling rather than the property-wide 30-barrel test governing Mountrail. Two owners with similar rates can end up with different tax treatment, different refrac eligibility and different offers, for no reason but the year the rig showed up.
When Holding Makes More Sense Than Selling
If a recent permit or active spacing order covers your acreage, waiting is usually sensible. A buyer pricing the interest today prices the old tail and takes the new unit as upside; once the well is drilled and the division order arrives, you are negotiating over a known number. Selling makes more sense when the interest really is just a tail — old wells, no permits, no recent spacing activity — and when there is a competing use for the money, or an estate to divide among heirs who do not all want a royalty interest. Four siblings splitting a check that moves with oil prices is a worse arrangement than four splitting a number. Either way, do the title work first: deeds and probate records sit with the Mountrail County Recorder at 101 North Main Street in Stanley.
We buy producing and non-producing interests for cash, and we will say plainly when we think holding is the better call. Start with our Mountrail County mineral rights page, which has a short form and the details we need to put a number together. Owners elsewhere in the basin can use the same approach to sell North Dakota mineral rights anywhere we operate, or reach us through our contact page.
Photos: Amoeba1029 / Wikimedia Commons, CC0; Chad Davis / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0; Lindsey G / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0; Tim Evanson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
MINERAL RIGHTS & ROYALTIES
Ready to explore an offer for your mineral rights?
Tell us a little about your interest. Get a free, no-obligation review from Selling My Mineral Rights.
