The Wellbore Exploration and Location Logistic System (WELLS) is a living national wellbore database and tool created and maintained by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), providing access to over 6 million public wellbore records from state, federal, and tribal resources. Sourced from over 65 authoritative, but disparate resources, the WELLS products combine well data from oil, gas, underground injection, research, geothermal, geotechnical, groundwater and other types of wells in a single, unified system. In addition to surface location of these wells, the underlying database combines select, key attributes for features such as, well age, depth, and operating status. The system also provides users with references back to the 65 disparate original sources used in this unified platform.

Additional Information: The WELLS (formerly titled CO2-Locate) offers two related and published product collections for users: the WELLS Database and the WELLS Interactive Application. The WELLS Database contains the public wellbore data in both tabular and geospatial formats, and the WELLS Interactive Application enables visualization and access to the public wellbore records through an intuitive web-based mapping tool. Together, the WELLS resource provides a centralized, geospatial-enabled wellbore repository to support Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) initiatives from site suitability to long-term storage integrity.

The WELLS Database is an integrated national well dataset, representing open-source wellbore data from over 65 disparate state, tribal, and federal entities. The database provides publicly available well header data with key attributes such as well age, depth, and status. The database contains a fully integrated CSV file with all values in numerical columns, such as depth, converted into numbers. This version has a NETL produced API (American Petroleum Institute) number column and has been handled for redundancies, resulting in one record for every unique API number. The database also contains a fully integrated CSV file, where all original data are kept as text values. Additionally, the database includes a shapefile containing key attributes and coordinates from the integrated dataset, reformatted public wells CSV files, and a proprietary well density grid shapefile.

Notes for consideration: The WELLS Database and Interactive Application will be updated periodically with new datasets and information. A field dictionary with field (i.e., attribute) coverage across acquired public well resources, and the resulting integrated public well datasets are available in the spreadsheet, WELLS_Field_Dictionary.xlsx. Summary layers provided in this database are derived from proprietary layers and do not always contain key features (status, type, true vertical depth, or spud year) and therefore might not be shown when data are queried for those features.