The Cherokee Nobody Is Writing About

By Stephen Clayman · August 17, 2026

Oklahoma Mineral Owners,

Here is a number that should be better known than it is. As of this week there are 55 rigs running in Oklahoma. Eleven of them are in Grady County, which is the SCOOP, and which everyone writes about. Eleven of them are in Roger Mills County, and almost nobody writes about that at all.

Add Custer County's six and Caddo's four and Washita's one, and the western tier is running twenty two rigs. That is roughly forty percent of the rigs in the state, in counties most people outside the industry could not find on a map.

A good part of what those rigs are drilling is the Cherokee.

What the Cherokee actually is, and where

The Cherokee is a Pennsylvanian interval, Desmoinesian in age, and out here it means a stack of sands that operators are now drilling horizontally on the north shelf of the Anadarko Basin. Locally the individual benches carry names an old landman would recognize: Red Fork, Skinner, Prue, and their relatives.

It sits in Ellis, Roger Mills, and Custer, with thinner extensions into Beckham, Washita, Caddo, and Dewey.

I am being specific about the geography because there is a naming problem that costs people money. Northeast Oklahoma sits on the Cherokee Platform, a geologic province named after the same rocks. Bartlesville, Nowata, Vinita, Claremore. Those counties are full of oil history and full of minerals worth owning, but they are not being horizontally developed, and there is no Cherokee boom underneath them. Nowata County has had two wells spudded since 2020. Washington County has had three.

Meanwhile Roger Mills and Ellis have each had around 127.

Two different places, one name. If you own in northeast Oklahoma and a mailer arrives talking about Cherokee drilling near your section, whoever wrote it does not know the difference, and you should weigh their number accordingly. We put a full explanation on the Cherokee Shale page, because we had it wrong on our own site until a client corrected us, and he was right.

The company doing most of it

Roughly 320 Cherokee wells have been spudded in Oklahoma since 2020. About 190 of them belong to Mewbourne Oil.

Mewbourne is privately held, does not have to explain itself to analysts, and does not issue a press release every time it turns a bit to the right. That is a large part of why a play this size stays quiet. There is no stock to promote, so there is no story to place. Behind them, in rough order: Crawley Petroleum, Upland, Citizen Energy, SandRidge, Devon, Nadel and Gussman, Duncan Oil, Charter Oak, Warwick, Rockies Resources, Continental, and Mach.

Mewbourne alone currently has six rigs turning in those counties.

The part that matters to a mineral owner

Two numbers.

First, of the roughly 295 Cherokee wells currently producing in Oklahoma, 136 first produced since January 2025. Roger Mills alone accounts for 76 of those. Nearly half of the producing wells in this play came online in the last nineteen months. That is not a mature field settling into decline. That is a field being built.

Second, and more useful: there are 40 drilled but uncompleted wells and 42 approved permits sitting in the Cherokee right now. Eighty two wells in the queue against 295 producing. Those are wells somebody has already spent money on and intends to finish.

An undrilled or uncompleted location is real value that belongs to the mineral owner, and it is exactly the thing a mailer offer prices at zero. When a buyer takes your last twelve months of royalty income and multiplies it, the arithmetic cannot see a permit. It cannot see a DUC. It cannot see the six rigs.

That is the whole game out here. The difference between a fair number and a lowball one in Roger Mills County is not usually a disagreement about the producing wells. It is that one party counted the queue and the other did not.

What to do about it

If you own minerals in Ellis, Roger Mills, Custer, Dewey, Beckham, Washita, or Caddo, and you are getting mail, do this much before you answer any of it:

1. Find out whether your section has a permit or a DUC on it. That single fact moves value more than anything else on the page.
2. Find out who operates around you. A Mewbourne section and a section held by a small operator with no rigs are different assets.
3. Ask any buyer, including us, to show you their remaining location count and the reasoning behind it. If they will not break it out, they are pricing your check rather than your minerals.

We track permits, spuds, and completions in these counties weekly out of Tulsa. Send a check stub, a legal description, or just the county and we will tell you what the drilling around you actually means, free, whether or not you ever sell anything to us. If holding is the right answer, and out here it frequently is, we will tell you that too.

Well counts are from Enverus and current as of August 2026.

BR

Related: Cherokee Shale · Western Anadarko Basin · Roger Mills County · Ellis County · Custer County · How mineral rights are valued · When not to sell