FAQ: Are production data available for Kentucky wells?

Data available from the Kentucky Geological Survey:

• Statewide historic oil and gas production by year (1883-2003)
• Monthly oil production by county (statewide 1883-1918, monthly by county 1919-2003)
• Monthly gas production by county (1986-2003, previous year data for eastern and western Kentucky regions)

Production data by county for the previous year are held confidential for one year; 2002 data by county are scheduled for release in April 2004. Monthly production data tables may include negative values; these represent accounting adjustments by the Revenue Cabinet. If data for a particular county, month, or year are missing then those data are not available. In some cases, production is reported from counties with no known producing wells (gas production reported in Campbell County for 2000). This is a reporting error by the purchaser; it is most likely that Campbell County, Tennessee production was misreported to Kentucky.

Monthly oil and gas production data by county are reported to the Severance and Property Tax Divisions of the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet. Beginning about 1986, the previous year's data are being held confidential by the Cabinet for one year. Historical oil production data in this format are available beginning in 1918, and gas production data are available beginning in 1986. In 1994 legislation was adopted that beginning with the 1997 report year the Division of Oil and Gas of the Kentucky Division of Mines and Minerals began requiring production data to be reported directly to the Division by oil and gas operators. By statute, the data reported to the Division will remain confidential for one year. These data are now available in the Oil and Gas Production Report. Data for the years 1997 through 2004 are available by county.

These monthly data by well are provided in two formats:

• Fixed-width ASCII text files online at the Division of Oil and Gas, Technical Information Library. These files are arranged by year and county with separate files for oil and gas production. Within each county data file, the wells are identified by the permit number issued by the Division of Oil and Gas. These files can be saved to your local hard drive and opened in a spreadsheet. Using text to column (parsing) utilities, the data can be easily divided into columns.
• The Oil and Gas Well Search Pages now include a link to production data for wells. A download facility provides the ability to save comma delimited file. Other delimiters may be selected. Note that some wells may have multiple instances of production for the same year and month. We are working with the Division to resolve this problem. If you are the operator of a particular well and wish to correct the data, contact Brandon Nuttall

Data provided by the Division of oil and gas include a permit number that must be matched with Kentucky Geological Survey well record data (Kentucky oil and gas well shape file). (Caveat: the KGS permit number has leading spaces to pad it to seven characters and lacks dashes.) The data provided by the Division of Oil and Gas in their Technical Information Library is more complete than the data provided at the Kentucky Geological Survey search pages. That is, the Division has data for many permits that have not been matched with wells in the KGS database. As these wells are matched between the Division and KGS databases, the data will be come available through the KGS site.

Note that the Division of Oil and Gas data are by stock tank battery (oil) or meter (gas) and as such may represent production from multiple wells on a lease. If several wells on a lease have identical monthly production data, suspect that the data has been apportioned from a single reported figure. For example, from the Henderson County oil production for 2000:

Permit  Farm                   Well      Pool              Formation      Jan   Feb   Mar
48219   BARNES, EULA              4      CATRON CREEK      O'Hara Lime     85    93   100 ...
48988   BARNES, EULA              6      HEBBARDSVILLE     O'Hara Lime     85    93   100 ...
49363   BARNES, EULA              8      HEBBARDSVILLE     O'Hara Lime     85    93   100 ...

That is, the lease produced a total of 300 barrels during March and each well was assigned one third of the lease total.

To copy the text files from the Division of Oil and Gas to Excel:

• Go to the Oil and Gas Production Report
• Scroll to find the file of data you want. Right click on the file and select Save Target as... Specify a destination on your local hard drive.
• Start Excel with a blank worksheet
• Click File | Open and change the Files of type to *.txt. Navigate to the file you saved and select it.
• Excel should recognize the file is text and will start the Text Import wizard. The file is fixed-width ASCII text. Check to make sure the wizard doesn't insert extra column break lines or miss a few.
• After you click finish, the data should all be lined up in columns for summing or to transfer to other applications.