Core Research Center (CRC) Core Collection

The Core Research Center (CRC) was established in 1974 by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to preserve valuable rock cores for use by scientists and educators from government, industry, and academia. The cylindrical sections of rock are permanently stored and available for examination and testing at the core storage facility in Denver, Colorado. The CRC is currently one of the largest and most heavily used public core repositories in the United States and encourages use of its facility by all interested parties. The system is a database containing the well information for the cores in the collection. The information about the wells usually includes operator, well name, API number, location, depths and possibly formation names. The system also tracks analytical results, thin sections and photographs for wells that have all or some of these associated items. Currently, the CRC houses cores from over 9,000 wells representing 1,700,000 feet of core from 33 states and cuttings from more than 52,000 wells representing 238,000,000 feet of drilling in 27 states. Most of the material is from oil/gas and mineral wells in the Rocky Mountain Region.