Does anyone know any public sources for GIS leaseholding data for large players in the Oil & Gas industry. I would like to get my hands on leasehold polygons of large producers like Chevron, Exxon, etc. To my knowledge this is all public data, and in no way private, correct?
[GIS] Publicly available oil & gas lease data
dataoil-gas
Best Answer
There are couple of ways of getting hold of this data. Firstly directly via National Data Repositories which are data bank's that commonly hold information on natural resources data. Including licence blocks, wells etc
The data is publically available, as it is a way of publicising natural resource, but can be spread across several regulators and agencies (in USA Federal Ocean Management vs New Mexico State and Texas Land Office) within a country as well as individual governments (e.g. Scotland vs. England). You will have to look into each country to get hold of the information and understand juristiction and how the data is distributed. For example:
This will take a while unless you know which countries you can focus on. I have found that licence information is readily available in GIS format with attributes within Western Europe and USA normally through a primary website or through a bit of digging through different regulators. Outside of Europe and the USA it quickly becomes much harder to reserach and get hold of spatial data without resorting to georeferencing and digitising your data. Try getting hold of Iraqi Kurdistan, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, Mexico licence blocks from their government sites.
Secondly buy the data. The above is why the likes of Wood MacKenzie and IHS sell products to companies with this data already tidied up and standardised. But for a cost!