Coming off a recent multimillion-dollar transaction, Wing Resources is continuing its partnership with Natural Gas Partners (NGP) to pursue mineral and royalty acquisitions in the Permian Basin.

The Dallas-based company said Aug. 28 it had raised $100 million of new equity commitments from NGP for Wing Resources IV LLC, the management team’s fourth partnership with NGP.

Earlier this year, Wing Resources agreed to sell a predecessor company to Tulsa, Okla.-based coal producer Alliance Resource Partners LP for $145 million in cash. The transaction, which included 9,000 net royalty acres in the Midland Basin and exposure to more than 400,000 gross acres, closed Aug. 2.

Wing Resources was launched in 2016 by the company’s CEO, Nick Varel, after multiple successes with Elephant Oil & Gas—a company Varel co-founded when he was 25 years old.

“We grew [Wing Resources] organically one track at a time and one acquisition at a time,” Varel told Hart Energy in a 2018 interview. “We timed the market right by purchasing large amounts of tier-one minerals in the Permian Basin in 2016 and 2017. As a result, we have experienced massive well growth.”

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Over the years, Wing Resources has accumulated a mineral and royalty position covering more than 200,000 gross acres and over 4,000 wells throughout the Midland and Delaware basins of West Texas and New Mexico, according to the company website.

For Wing IV, Varel is joined by Josh Strange as executive vice president of land, Jimmy Elskes as CFO, Joe Rogers as engineering vice president and Trey Hargrove as geoscience vice president.

In a statement on Aug. 28, Varel said: “The Wing IV team believes our mineral and royalty expertise, along with strong equity backing and market relationships, will enable us to continue creating value in today’s dynamic environment.”

Founded in 1988, NGP has roughly $20 billion of cumulative equity commitments that include other investments in the oil and gas minerals space, which has seen rapid growth in interest over the past several years.

An estimated $15 billion of private equity money has been deployed in minerals, said Stephanie Reed, senior vice president of land and marketing for Parsley Energy Inc., while moderating a roundtable during the business conference at this year’s Summer NAPE on Aug. 21.

During the roundtable, Chris Transier, president and CEO of Fortis Minerals LLC backed by EnCap Investments LP, added that minerals are currently the “shining star” of private-equity portfolios relative to E&P companies.

“On the one hand, they want to highlight the shining star of their portfolio,” Transier said of mineral acquisition companies. “On the other hand, they don’t want to sell it because every year they wait it seems to get more valuable because it produces more cash flow.”

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