Uintah and Duchesne Counties have 910 approved permits in the last 90 days. That is more than anywhere in America outside the Delaware and Midland Basins, and almost nobody is writing about it.
The Uinta Basin is, right now, the most active drilling area in the United States that almost nobody writes about for mineral owners. Uintah County has 637 approved permits in the last 90 days and Duchesne has 273. Nine hundred and ten permits between two counties. Outside the Delaware and Midland, nothing in America is close.
Berlin buys Uinta Basin minerals and royalties, in Uintah and Duchesne, and we also buy the Carbon and Emery County coalbed methane interests that nobody else will look at.
The operator list is the story here.
Koda Resources already operates roughly 3,940 producing wells in Uintah County, more than any other company, and its two permitting entities, Koda Uinta and Koda GNB, account for about 452 of the recent permits. Behind them:
| Operator | Approved permits, last 90 days |
|---|---|
| Koda Uinta | 259 |
| Koda GNB | 193 |
| FourPoint Resources | 120 |
| Uinta Wax Operating | 78 |
| SM Energy | 73 |
| Finley Resources | 38 |
| Scout Energy Management | 33 |
| Anschutz Exploration | 33 |
| WEM Operating | 29 |
| Crescent Energy | 22 |
| Berry Petroleum | 14 |
When a company most owners have never heard of becomes the largest operator in a county and simultaneously files hundreds of permits, that is a consolidation. Consolidations are the single most reliable predictor of mineral owners getting mail, because acreage positions get cleaned up at the same time they get drilled.
If offers are arriving at your Uintah or Duchesne address, this is why. The person sending them knows what is permitted around your section. Most owners do not.
Uinta oil is genuinely unusual. It is waxy, with a high pour point, meaning it approaches solid at ambient temperature and has to be kept heated in transit. For most of the basin's history that confined it to a small number of Salt Lake City refineries configured to run it, which meant a captive market and a persistent discount. Rail capacity opened Gulf Coast options and changed the arithmetic.
What that means for you: Uinta crude trades at a differential to WTI driven by logistics, and that differential moves. A valuation that quotes you a WTI-based number without disclosing the differential it assumed is not showing you its work. Ours shows you the price assumption as a line item, because in this basin it is one of the largest single inputs.
This is the fact that distinguishes Utah from every other state we buy in. The Utah Geological Survey's own land classification for the Uinta Basin:
| Manager | Share of basin minerals |
|---|---|
| BLM | 37.6% |
| Native American reservation | 19.6% |
| State of Utah | 11.0% |
| U.S. Forest Service | 8.9% |
| Private | 22.3% |
A private Uinta mineral owner holds a minority position in somebody else's checkerboard. Split estate is normal rather than exceptional. Three consequences that show up in real dollars:
None of this makes a Uinta interest a bad asset. It makes it one that has to be underwritten with the overlay in view, and it explains why a lot of out of state buyers quote Utah low and decline to say why.
Southwest of the oil fairway, Carbon and Emery Counties are coalbed methane: the Ferron and Drunkards Wash fields, among the earliest commercial CBM in the West. Roughly 1,000 producing wells in Carbon and 234 in Emery, with a single operator holding most of both.
These are small monthly gas checks from shallow wells drilled thirty years ago, split across two or three generations. Every large buyer ignores them, because the cost of running title and recording a deed is the same whether an interest is worth two thousand dollars or two hundred thousand. Owners read that silence as proof of no value.
We have no minimum, we run our own title, and we pay all closing costs. See small mineral interests and unclaimed royalties.
Permit, rig, and well counts are sourced from Enverus and current as of August 2026. Land ownership shares are from the Utah Geological Survey's Uinta Basin land classification. 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.
The carbonate-rich interval that made the modern Uinta a horizontal play. Most of the recent drilling targets it, and it is the reason a basin written off as a conventional relic is now one of the busiest permitting areas in the country.
The stacked lacustrine section that has produced here since the 1940s. Douglas Creek, Castle Peak, and the various Green River benches, some conventional, some now horizontal.
The richest oil shale resource in the world sits under this basin. It is not commercially produced, and any valuation that assigns it value is selling you something.
The southwestern deep basin, historically gas-prone, with a very different production profile from the waxy crude fairway.
Uintah and Duchesne carry essentially all of the drilling. Carbon and Emery to the southwest are coalbed methane rather than oil, and they are valued on completely different logic.
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