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Welcome to WellWiki.org. Currently, the site contains data on approximately 150,000 oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania. By the end of summer, we expect to cover over 500,000 oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. Eventually, we hope to provide data on all oil and gas well ever drilled in North America – an estimated 4 million wells since the Drake well in 1859.

Each well is identified by its well number and given a “well page.” For instance, the so-called Renz No. 1 well credited with “discovering” the Marcellus is officially assigned well number 37-125-22074. Each well page lists when the well was permitted, the municipality (e.g., township, borough or city) and county where a well is located, and who operates the well. If the well was drilled (or “spud” in industry parlance), we provide that date too. Where available we indicate whether a well is “unconventional” or “horizontal.” Other data typically include inspections, violation and fines, production history and waste quantities and disposal methods. Soon, we will be adding data on hydraulic fracturing treatments.

From a well page, you can easily click to visit municipality, county and operator pages. These pages provide listings of every well we know of that is located in a given place, or owned by a given operator. For instance, the Dimock Township page gives a listing of all the wells drilled in this roughly 30 square-mile community. A glance at this page shows that Cabot Oil & Gas Corp is a major operator in Dimock. You can also sort the wells by different fields. For instance, perhaps the “violations” data catches your eye. If you sort by that column, you might notice that one of the wells, well number 37-115-20040, has racked up 14 separate violations. If you wanted to learn more you could simply click through to that well. If you wanted, you could also visit the Cabot Oil & Gas Corp page and find out where else this company has oil and gas wells. It turns out that Cabot’s Pennsylvania wells are concentrated in Susquehanna County, which is in northeastern Pennsylvania, along the New York State border.

One of the site’s most powerful features is its search engine. If you know something about a well, you can easily find out more about it. For instance, perhaps you read about the February 2014 explosion at two Chevron wells in Green County. The article mentions the “Lanco” well pad. Entering “lanco” in the search box brings back three wells: 37-059-25887, 37-059-25888, and 37-059-25889.

In its current form, WellWiki.org is primarily “structured” data – meaning facts and figures about wells, towns and operators. The pages are assembled by having a wikibot crawl and scrape a MySQL database. To unleash the site’s full potential, we need interested stakeholders like you to complement these numbers with narrative-driven content, just like with Wikipedia. For instance, in the case of the Chevron Lanco explosion, one of our editors created a page about the explosion. In another case, an editor created a page about forced pooling, a different type of issue. If you are interested in becoming a WellWiki.org editor, please sign up!

For more information about the people, organizations and technology behind WellWiki.org, visit About WellWiki.