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:

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.