# About ogwell — scope, sources and limits

> How this site is built: what is loaded, what is derived, and what the register cannot say.

## How this site is built

A directory of one public file. Not affiliated with the Kansas Geological Survey or the Kansas Corporation Commission.

### One file, 518,949 wells

the Kansas Geological Survey publishes the Kansas oil and gas well register as an open
feature service, updated continuously. We take the whole file —
518,949 wells, no sampling — and our copy is from
**2026-08-21**.

### Annuaire, and why

This site is built as a **directory**: the spine is the
entity, one well and its status, because that is what somebody arrives
looking for. The operator is a strong facet — and the question
« who left wells behind » genuinely lives there —
but nobody turns up holding a company name, and the legal duty attaches to
the parcel.

We tested whether these wells chain to the Survey’s
master well inventory, which would have made this a resolver: 0 of 50 sampled
ids matched. They are separate id spaces. So the directory form is the
measured answer, not the default one.

### ⚠️ Two fields that disagree

247,875 wells are classed as plugged and abandoned; 92,867 of them
carry no plugging date, and 26,002 wells carry a date under another
class. The class is what the pages count. Neither field is discarded and
neither is quietly preferred.

### ⚠️ The API number is not unique

477,901 wells carry one (92.1%) and 477,325 of those are
distinct — 576 numbers are shared. The Survey states it does
not use the API as a unique identifier; the KGS well id is. Both are indexed
here, and the record never presents the API as the key.

### What we add

**The county.** The service carries none. We derive it from
the API’s FIPS prefix and resolve it against the county table the same
publisher issues: 92.1% of the register, all 105 counties, no
unresolved codes.

**Normalised names** for operators and fields, so they can be
counted and joined, and per-county depth medians that exist nowhere else.

### ⚠️ A blank is not a zero

Depth is reported on 86.4% of wells, the field name on 71.6%, the
producing formation on 20.6%. Every median here is computed over reported
values only, with the count printed beside it. And measured on the delivered
file, not on the service: asking the service how many rows are
*not null* returns 100% for columns that are in fact mostly empty
strings.

### ⚠️ What no page carries

The township, range, section and quarter call locate a parcel. They are on
the individual record, rendered from the URL fragment, and never on an
indexable page. The source carries no landowner name at all, and none was
downloaded.

### How the pages are chosen

A county gets a page at 500 wells (82 of
105 qualify, covering 91.5%); an operator at
300; a field at 300; a formation at
400. A county-and-class page needs 200 wells,
must not cover more than 70% of its county, and must
name at least 8 different operators — that list is the
only thing such a page carries that its parent does not.

### Source and conditions

Oil and Gas Wells, the Kansas Geological Survey. Their terms permit copying and
redistribution without fee and require an attribution, quoted word for
word:

The source of this material is the Kansas Geological Survey website at http://www.kgs.ku.edu/. All Rights Reserved.

This is an independent copy, not the register. The Survey recommends that its data be taken directly from a KGS server rather than through another site that may have changed it — for anything a transaction depends on, use theirs.

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Página: https://ogwell.pages.dev/about/
Fonte: Oil and Gas Wells — Kansas Geological Survey
Recolha: 2026-08-21