The Powder River is a stacked play: one section can hold Turner, Parkman, Sussex, Shannon, Frontier, Niobrara, and Mowry targets at different depths. Any offer that prices your interest off this month's check is ignoring most of what you own.
The Powder River Basin is the best demand to effort ratio in the country for a mineral owner looking for straight information, because essentially nobody has written any. It is also a play where the standard mailer valuation method is structurally wrong.
Berlin buys Powder River minerals and royalties, concentrated in Converse and Campbell Counties, and we also buy the legacy coalbed methane interests that every other buyer ignores.
In a single zone play, an interest is worth roughly what its wells will produce, and a multiple of current income gets you close.
The Powder River is not that. One section can carry Turner, Parkman, Sussex, Shannon, Frontier, Niobrara, and Mowry targets at different depths. A tract with a single producing Turner well may have several more locations beneath and beside it that no one has drilled yet.
An offer computed as a multiple of your current royalty check assigns those locations a value of zero. On core Converse and Campbell acreage under active development, that is not a rounding error. It is the majority of what you own.
This is, in our experience, the single largest and most consistent way Powder River owners get underpaid, and it is invisible unless someone shows you the work. When we underwrite a Powder River interest, remaining locations by bench, with the probability we assigned and the reason, is an explicit line in what we send you.
The honest flip side: not every township supports every bench. Niobrara and Frontier are real in some parts of the basin and speculative in others, and Mowry is lightly drilled almost everywhere. We price those with a probability rather than promising them, and we will tell you when we think an area does not support the assumption. A buyer who counts every bench at full value everywhere is doing the mirror image of the mailer error.
Most states settle the deduction question through decades of shifting case law. Wyoming settled it by statute.
W.S. section 30-5-304 defines royalty as the mineral owner's share of production free of the costs of production, and expressly excludes from "costs of production" only three things:
That is a first marketable product rule with a defined downstream carve out. Gathering, dehydration, and compression needed to make the gas marketable are costs of production and are not deductible. Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. v. Followill, 2004 WY 80, 93 P.3d 238, applies it.
A Wyoming royalty owner therefore stands in a stronger position than an owner in North Dakota, Kansas, or Pennsylvania, where the default runs the other way. If your Powder River check shows gathering or compression deductions, ask. Our royalty statement decoder explains the lines, and our letter templates include a certified mail demand for an itemized accounting.
No Wyoming individual income tax. No Wyoming tax on your capital gain when you sell, resident or nonresident, and no withholding at closing. For an out of state seller this is as simple as it gets in the United States.
But the production side is heavy. Severance tax is 6 percent on normal oil and gas production under W.S. section 39-14-204(a), with a reduced 4 percent for qualifying stripper oil wells and a 0.050 percent conservation tax, and then county ad valorem production tax at local mill levies on top, reassessed each July. Combined, Wyoming's total production burden is among the highest in the country, and it comes off before your royalty is calculated.
Two Powder River interests producing identical volumes to a Permian interest will not pay identically, and that is why. See taxes when you sell mineral rights.
The Powder River CBM boom of the 1990s and 2000s drilled tens of thousands of shallow gas wells across Campbell and Johnson Counties. Most are now marginal, plugged, or in the hands of small operators. What it left behind is thousands of small gas royalties, split by two or three rounds of inheritance, paying a few dollars a month or nothing at all.
Every large buyer ignores these, because the fixed cost of running title and recording a deed is the same whether the interest is worth $2,000 or $200,000. Owners read the silence as proof there is no value.
We run our own title, we have no minimum, and we pay all closing costs. If money is sitting in operator suspense or with the Wyoming unclaimed property division, we will tell you how to get it and you keep it, whether or not you sell anything to us. See small mineral interests and unclaimed royalties.
Last reviewed August 2026. Rates and mill levies change annually. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm or a tax advisor, and this page is general information rather than advice about your interest.
Shallow shelf sandstones with a long vertical production history, now targeted horizontally in parts of Converse and Campbell.
Upper Cretaceous sands that carry much of the current oil development in the southern Powder River.
The workhorse of modern Powder River development, and the target most often behind a new well on your section.
Deeper targets developed unevenly across the basin. Real inventory in some townships, speculative in others, and a place where honest underwriting applies a probability rather than a promise.
The deepest of the commonly named targets, lightly drilled, and effectively free optionality on acreage under active development.
The 1990s and 2000s Powder River CBM boom left thousands of small gas royalties across Campbell and Johnson, most now marginal or plugged. Old, fractional, and generally ignored by every other buyer.
Converse and Campbell carry the current oil development. We also buy the legacy coalbed methane royalties nobody else will look at.
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Prefer the phone? Call or text 918-984-1645 and you will get Stephen, the owner, not a call center. If we miss you, we text back the same day.