Oil and Natural Gas Wells, Western U.S.

A complete set of wells associated with oil, natural gas, and coal bed natural gas development in the western states as of June 2004. This is a static dataset even though liquid energy development is a highly dynamic endeavor. Because these well location datasets are generally housed and managed by various state-based agencies (typically the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commissions) a uniform, spatially precise coverage for the western United States has not been available to date. This layer consolidates the best available well location data from ND, SD, MT, WY, CO, NM, UT, AZ, OR, and CA (ID and WA do not report any liquid energy development) and standardizes the attributites. While static as of June 2004 the well status field (SUM_STATUS) identifies 'pending' wells planned at some future data. Also, the user is cautioned that this layer only contains known and reported wells and may not represent 100% of the wells actually on the ground.