Description: The the Williston Basin has been a leading petroleum producer for over a half century with development beginning around the turn of the 20th century. The spatial and temporal spread of the associated wells is important from both an economic perspective but also a natural resource view. These data were gathered from the state/province oil and gas divisions for use by USGS researchers and their collaborators in water resource specific studies. Each state/province provides slightly different information for each well, with some providing more information and others less. We attempted to create a spatial cross-walk that allowed each database to be merged to one another to create a final regional spatial database. Each well attribute contains information on the well type, SPUD date, name, operator and unique ID. In addition some of the wells have information on the producing field and bottom hole location.
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Copyright Text: All data were obtained from the state/province oil and gas webpages. Montana data provided by the Montana Board of Oil and Gas. Accessed April 11, 2013. http://bogc.dnrc.mt.gov/ North Dakota data provided by the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division. Accessed April 11, 2013. https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/ South Dakota data provided by the South Dakota Department of Environment & Natural Resources. Accessed April 11, 2013. http://denr.sd.gov/des/og/oghome.aspx
Description: The Williston Basin is an intracratonic basin that underlies portions of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota in the United States, and Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada. The Williston Basin has been a top domestic oil producing region since the 1960s and is currently in the midst of a major “oil boom” triggered by the discovery of substantial reserves associated with the Devonian-Mississippian Bakken Formation, along with advances in petroleum-recovery technologies and economic incentives related to the price of oil.
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Copyright Text: The boundary was digitized from a map produced by the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. This map can be found at http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/williston_basin.html.
Description: The Bakken Formation is a Late Devonian/Early Mississippian geologic formation that consists of three thin but laterally continuous members spanning portions of Alberta, Manitoba, Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. The members consist of two shale layers confining a sandstone/siltstone layer which is the primary producing layer. In April, 2013 the USGS completed an assessment of the Bakken Formations showing it is currently the largest known continuous oil resource in the contiguous US (Gaswirth et al., 2013,http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2013/3013/fs2013-3013.pdf).
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Copyright Text: The boundary was digitized from a map published in Smith and Bustin, 1997 (Regional Sedimentology and Stratigraphy of th eUpper Devonian and Lower Mississippian Bakken Formation, Williston Basin, Saskatchewan Geological Survey Open File Report 96-1) and Smith and Bustin, 2000 (Late Devonian and early Mississippian Bakken and Exshaw black shale source rocks, Western Canada Sedimentary Basin–a sequence stratigraphic interpretation: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, 84, no. 7, p. 940–960). We used the Sweetgrass Arch as the western boundary.