GIS TOOLS FOR CATALOGING OIL AND GAS WELLS USING ARCMAP AND GOOGLE EARTH KML

In many regions, extensive oil and gas operations have produced a large number of active and abandoned wells. Some of these wells may pose a risk for various types of underground storage projects, e.g. CO₂ sequestration or natural gas storage. Thus, it is imperative to locate and catalog wells to assess potential leakage risk, formulate mitigation strategies and comply with permitting requirements. However, cataloging oil and gas wells can be complicated because of diverse data sources, lack of data standardization, incomplete metadata characterization, and inaccurate well cataloging. Well data encompasses a wide variety of information including well status, spatial location, well construction, and, for abandoned wells, plugging procedures. Unfortunately, well data sets may also be characterized by inconsistent or conflicting data. Creating comprehensive and accurate well data sets is, therefore, a difficult and time consuming task that is critical for risk analysis and project permitting. Given the spatial distribution of oil and gas wells, GIS offers a wide variety of tools to help gather, organize, verify, correct, and archive well data. For example, data can be managed using a GIS geodatabase for storing all well spatial and non-spatial attributes. Mobile data collection systems such as ArcPad, coupled with GPS receivers, can verify well field locations and simultaneously update geodatabase information. Using KML, an interactive, graphical user interface can query and display the data from the geodatabase. This GIS-based approach has been used to evaluate multiple potential carbon sequestration sites (Moxa Arch, Mahoney Dome, and Scott Draw oil fields, and the Rock Springs Uplift) in Wyoming from risk and permitting perspectives. For these projects, data was collected from the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission online database. The data was clipped to the specific project site and loaded into a specially designed and constructed file geodatabase. Each oil and gas well location was checked for internal consistency, i.e. latitude/longitude, township/range, and footages, using a combination of air photos, well records, and ArcGIS tools. The WOGCC locations were field verified using GPS-enabled mobile devices. KML was used to display the final well location, field photographs, and well records.