WellDatabase & Louisiana

I thought we’d follow-up the WellDatabase vs SONRIS post with a  quick rundown of the data available in our oil & gas database for Louisiana, and take a look at the trends view able utilizing our online analysis tools.

Some basic numbers

WellDatabase contains a comprehensive catalog of data for Louisiana oil & gas wells. Here is a breakdown of the data:

A little more detail

To start breaking down the data a little, let’s look at the total producing well counts dating back to 1977.

A quick look shows the steady increase in producing wells through the mid 80s with a decline all the way to 1998. Then it picks back up and hovers around the 45,000 mark to today. As of December of 2011, there were 45,034 producing wells in Louisiana.

Beyond the sheer number of wells, you can also see the total oil production decline from the state. The steady decline curve would lend the fact that Louisiana has not had any new discoveries in oil recently.

In contrast, the gas chart helps to explain the rise in the well count in the late 90s and the increase in gas production is evident all the way to the Haynesville shale production in the late 2000s.

The overall chart gives a good view of the state as a whole.

Looking further into the summary of Louisiana wells, we easily see that the parish with the most wells (by a significant margin) is Caddo with 28,132. The Caddo parish production graph gives a very good look into the gas increase we saw at the state level.

WellDatabase’s production tools also contains many other production and decline curve analysis tools.

Another View

The production charts at the state and parish level do a good job of showing the amount of data available for analysis in WellDatabase, but what about filtering the dataset further. For example, let’s look at the wells spudded in the past six months.

The map provides color coded clusters making it quick and easy to view the hot areas of activity. Northwest Louisiana still holds the majority of activity for Louisiana. De Soto and Caddo parishes seem to be neck and neck with activity, so we’ll drill down into De Soto. We’ll also remove the Google maps layers and show the Parish outlines to better define De Soto.

There is activity throughout the parish, but the clusters show that there is a higher level of activity around the northern border there with Caddo parish. We’ll zoom into that area, specifically to section 9, township 14N, range 15W.

From there you can click on any well and get the detail for that well. For wells this new, most don’t have test or production data; however the do have general header data, casing info, scout information, well history information, and any files that exist for the well. For these wells we are talking mainly about permits, reserve pit inspections, and engineering files.

Conclusion

The main purpose of this post is to highlight the sheer amount of data in our well database, but it is nearly impossible to show this without highlighting how easy it is to search and find the data you need. What good is all the data if you can’t find what you are after.