A VISUAL HISTORY OF OIL FIELD DEVELOPMENT AND WASTEWATER INJECTION IN CALIFORNIA OIL FIELDS

Although the number and distribution of oil and gas activity is easily displayed through static images, the important dimension of time is often lost. Movies can be a way of capturing the temporal evolution of a well field. Here, we construct time-lapse movies to help understand the tempo of oil and gas field development and wastewater injection in California.

Data was collected from the California Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources online well record archive. For oil and gas wells, the spud date was not directly available. Instead, it was inferred from the date of the first geophysical log, which were usually run before well completion. In the case of wastewater injection, injection histories were scraped from the 1977 to present digitized records. These data were then processed using Python and visualized using GIS software packages. Time-lapse movies were then constructed using iMovie.

In the case of oil and gas field development, movies show the spatial development of fields, with wells clustering in established areas, until a new discovery is made and exploited. Understanding this evolution can be important for later hydrogeological study, as the age of the well controls the types of casing used, the types of geophysical logs recorded, and the quality of drilling information recorded by on-site geologists.

For wastewater injection, we have explored different ways of visualizing injected volumes, including graduated symbols and heat maps. Understanding the age and rate of injection is important, as water from older high-volume injection wells may have migrated further than that from more recent wells.