Riley Exploration Permian

Riley Exploration Permian

Riley Exploration Permian took its current form in 2016, when Bobby Riley merged family-held Riley Exploration Group with a publicly traded vehicle to create a company focused exclusively on the Permian Basin. The Rileys had been producing oil and gas for six decades across multiple US basins — but the merger remade the enterprise around New Mexico's Yeso trend, a shallower, conventional play in the northern Delaware Basin that generates stable, long-lived production from multiple pay zones including the Abo, Yeso, and San Andres formations. The firm's deployment sits entirely in the Permian, where it held roughly 68,000 net acres at year-end 2023, split between New Mexico and Texas. Riley runs a conventional vertical-well program with low decline rates and high oil cuts, targeting production from stacked carbonate reservoirs rather than chasing the shale horizontals that dominate the Midland and southern Delaware. The capital program funds a mix of step-out drilling, well recompletions, and bolt-on mineral acquisitions — a strategy that kept total production growing past 15,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day through 2023, even as the broader Permian rig count declined. By operating in a niche that majors have largely exited, Riley gains access to basin expertise and mineral titles that larger consolidators overlook. Riley's surface footprint spans roughly two dozen New Mexico counties, anchored in Eddy and Lea counties, with a field office in Artesia to support operations. The firm went public via a reverse merger in 2016, refinanced its capital structure with a $200 million credit facility in 2023, and has sustained shareholder returns through a fixed-plus-variable dividend policy announced in December 2022 (per the firm, December 2022). Management retains significant insider ownership, keeping operator incentives aligned with public shareholders. The family's generational knowledge of wellbore geology and water-handling infrastructure functions as an operational moat that prospect-generated deal flow rarely replicates. The firm straddles a line between public E&P and family-owned operator. Because the Rileys remain majority shareholders, Riley Exploration Permian can run a patient consolidation game without the quarterly pressure that drives public peers to high-decline shale economics. That governance structure allows the firm to buy small, neglected conventional packages — often 500 to 2,000 net acres — and plug them into an existing rig schedule and centralized saltwater disposal system, compressing per-barrel operating costs below what fragmented sellers can achieve on their own.