The Modern Well Map: Polygon Search, Formation Filters, and One-Click FracFocus Data

State regulatory agencies publish GIS data. Most of it is technically accessible. Very little of it is actually useful at the speed a working engineer needs.

Texas RRC’s GIS viewer will show you a well on a map. It will not let you draw a box around a county line, select every Wolfcamp well inside it, sort them by IP30, and export the list in under two minutes. That gap is what WellStrata’s Wells Explorer is designed to fill.

What the Wells Explorer is

The Wells Explorer is a full-screen interactive map showing every well in the WellStrata database — 3,300,000+ wells across 18+ states plus the offshore Gulf of Mexico — rendered as formation-colored dots on a dark Mapbox basemap.

Colors communicate formation at a glance: Wolfcamp wells render red, Bakken green, Niobrara blue, Bone Spring orange. At lower zoom levels, wells cluster into aggregated circles with well counts. Zoom in and the individual dots appear.

The left panel holds your filters: state, formation, county (which updates based on the formation you selected), operator name search, and a maximum wells slider from 100 to 10,000. The map refreshes as you change filters.

Polygon selection

The most useful feature on the map is polygon draw.

Click the draw button and your cursor becomes a crosshair. Click to place vertices, draw any shape you want over the map — an acreage block, a county segment, a radius around a prospect — and double-click to close the polygon. Turf.js immediately calculates which wells fall inside the boundary, highlights them in yellow, and loads them into the table panel below.

This matters in practice because acreage doesn’t respect county lines. When you’re screening a block that straddles Eddy and Lea counties, or you’re looking at a prospect offset by a meandering river bend, county-level filtering gives you too much noise. The polygon tool gives you exactly what’s inside the geometry.

The table caps at 500 wells for display. If your polygon captures more, you can tighten the formation filter to focus the result set. The CSV export pulls the full filtered dataset.

Well detail panel

Clicking any well on the map or in the table opens a detail panel on the right side.

The Production tab renders a full production history chart for that well — monthly oil, gas, and water volumes from first production to present. You can see the decline curve, identify workovers, and spot months where something clearly went sideways.

The Frac Job tab pulls the FracFocus disclosure for that well: total water volume (in Mbbl), true vertical depth, job date, and the complete ingredient list — chemical name, CAS number, purpose, and concentration as a percentage of the frac job. CAS numbers are hyperlinked to their PubChem entries for any compound you want to look up further.

Well comparison

Checkbox any two to ten wells in the table and click Compare. A modal opens with production curves plotted together on the same axis. The selected wells are highlighted on the map simultaneously at a larger marker size so you can see their geographic distribution while comparing their production profiles.

This is useful for peer selection — finding the wells that best resemble a proposed location before you commit to a type curve assumption — without having to export and realign data in a separate tool.

Saved screens

Filter combinations can be saved as named screens. If you have a regular workflow — say, reviewing new Permian completions in Reeves and Loving counties by a specific set of operators every month — save that screen once and reload it in one click.

The system supports up to 20 saved screens per user, stored server-side so they persist across sessions.

Deep linking

Every filter state can be captured as a URL with query parameters: ?state=TX&formation=WOLFCAMP&operator=DIAMONDBACK&showTable=1. This means you can share a specific filtered view with a colleague, link to a map state from a report, or bookmark a recurring starting point without setting up a saved screen.

The Wells Explorer is not a GIS system. It doesn’t have the projection controls, layer management, or raster overlay capabilities of dedicated spatial software. What it has is every well in the database on a fast map, with the filters, selection tools, and production context a working engineer needs to answer the question at hand without leaving the browser.

Wells Explorer is available on all WellStrata plans. The 14-day trial includes full access — no credit card required.