Sell Mineral Rights in Michigan

If you've held an Antrim shale royalty interest since the 1990s and watched the check get a little smaller almost every year since, you're not imagining it, and you're not doing anything wrong.

There's a particular kind of tired that comes from watching something shrink slowly over twenty or thirty years and wondering if you should have done something about it sooner. We hear that from Michigan owners more than almost anywhere else, because the Antrim shale, drilled heavily across the northern Lower Peninsula through the 1980s and 90s, is one of the oldest continuously producing shale gas plays in the country, and it has been quietly declining for a very long time.

We buy Antrim shale royalty and other Michigan oil and gas interests, and we specialize in exactly this kind of legacy position: an interest that's been paying steadily smaller amounts for years, where the owner isn't sure if it's still worth anything or if it's finally time to turn the last of it into one payment instead of another decade of shrinking checks.

Why the Antrim shale behaves the way it does

Antrim shale wells produce gas along with a significant amount of water, and their production profile is different from a modern horizontal shale well — they tend to build slowly to a peak over the first few years, then decline gradually and predictably for a long stretch afterward, sometimes staying in production for well over two decades. If your check has followed a long, slow downward slope rather than a sharp drop, that's the Antrim doing exactly what Antrim wells do.

Because so many Antrim wells have now been producing for twenty-plus years, most of the play is deep into that long tail of decline. New drilling in the Antrim is rare today, so like a lot of the mature plays we work in, value here comes almost entirely from what's left in the ground and how many more years the well realistically has, not from any prospect of new activity.

Reading a Michigan royalty statement that's been shrinking for years

A statement that's a fraction of what it was ten years ago isn't a sign your interest has gone bad, it's the natural arc of a mature gas well nearing the end of its economic life. The honest question worth asking isn't whether the check will bounce back, for most legacy Antrim interests it won't, but how many more years of a shrinking check you're likely looking at, and whether that total is worth more to you as one payment now.

We build our offers around exactly that math: what your well has left, discounted for the fact that gas wells this mature typically decline further before they stop, priced against current natural gas pricing rather than what gas was worth when your interest was first leased decades ago.

Ownership that's often changed hands more than the well has

A lot of Antrim interests have been inherited once or twice by now, since the play is old enough that original lessors have often passed the interest down to children or grandchildren. If you inherited your interest and never got a full explanation of what it is or where it comes from, that's common, and we're happy to walk through what we find in the record with you before you decide anything.

We also see interests that were split among siblings at inheritance, so if you only hold a fraction of what your parents originally owned, that's still something we can quote and buy on its own.

What a Michigan sale looks like from here

Send us your county, the well or lease name if you have it, and a recent statement, and we'll pull the production history ourselves. Northern Lower Peninsula counties like Otsego, Antrim, and Kalkaska have decades of Antrim data available, which lets us build a confident decline projection rather than a rough guess.

Once you accept an offer, we handle the paperwork and close through a title company or attorney escrow, typically within a few weeks. There's no cost to find out what a mature Michigan interest like this is actually worth today.