Methodology & data sources

Sources

WellCensus re-publishes the public well registries of state oil & gas regulators, unified under one schema and one canonical key: the API number (API-10, digits only; the handful of source rows without a usable API carry a state-record fallback key). Current ingests:

The national orphan overlay is the USGS Documented Orphaned Wells dataset (doi 10.5066/P91PJETI, 2022 snapshot, 117,672 wells in 27 states), merged onto state records by API number where possible.

Per-state coverage (honest scope)

The full US universe is roughly ~3 million drilled wells across 30+ producing states — no free public dataset carries all of them, and WellCensus doesn’t claim to. What it does carry: 23state registries, ingested directly from each regulator’s bulk data, with the gaps stated per state. “Location index” means the regulator’s bulk file with attributes is not scriptably available yet — well identity, coordinates and status class are live; operators and dates are queued.

Texasdeserves a straight answer: the RRC’s statewide surface-well index (1.3M+ wellbore locations, API + status symbol) is live here, but the RRC publishes its full-attribute files only through a manual file-transfer portal, so operator names and dates for Texas load in a follow-up enrichment pass rather than an automated feed.

Status & type normalization

Every state’s status/type codes are normalized to five status buckets (active, plugged, orphan, shut-in, other) and four type buckets, with the raw state code preserved on every well page. Dry holes and “abandoned” map to plugged except where a state’s program defines abandoned as unplugged-with-no-operator (orphan).

Operator resolution

Raw operator spellings are exact-normalized (case, punctuation, INC/LLC/CO/CORP suffixes) into 101,832 canonical operators — 2,833,767 of 4,159,397wells are linked (location-index states publish no operator names yet). No fuzzy matching: subsidiaries stay separate on purpose. State bookkeeping records (“NOT ASSIGNED”, pre-migration placeholders, orphan funds) are kept for completeness but excluded from rankings and search indexing.

Indexing policy (completeness gate)

All 4,159,397 wells are served on demand, but only the 4,157,013 wells carrying at least an operator link, a lifecycle date or coordinates are submitted for search indexing — records below that threshold are too thin to be useful search results. Depth figures above 35,000 ft are treated as source errors and excluded from rankings.

Refresh cadence

State registries republish daily-to-monthly; WellCensus re-ingests on a weekly-to-monthly cadence per state, re-resolves operators after each batch, and stamps every page with a machine-readable “Dataset updated” timestamp plus Dataset JSON-LD dateModified. The USGS orphan file is a static 2022 snapshot, re-checked for revisions.

Licensing & attribution

Source data is public record published by U.S. state and federal agencies. WellCensus compilations may be cited with attribution to “WellCensus (wellcensus.com)”. Contact kenny@hyder.me for bulk or API access.