Description:
Information was provided to the Division of Geology and Earth Resources by operators and filed. Beginning in 1947, Information Circulars were created from the filed information provided by the operators. Points were created and attributed from information contained in these Information Circulars and addendums. Different methods were used to generate these points. Some were programmatically generated, some approximated using section divisions, and others were electronically measured from section lines. It was known that some of the well locations were in error for two reasons. Firstly, the spreadsheet data came from sources one or more iterations removed from the original data. Original data is located in hard-copy files maintained by the Washington Division of Geology and Earth Resources (Livingston, 1958; McFarland, 1981; McFarland, 1983; oil and gas addendum) pursuant to the Oil and Gas Conservation Act, Chapter 146 (RCW 78.52.001 to 78.52-550), and in hard-copy files for some wells drilled prior to 1954 when the Oil and Gas Conservation Act went into effect. Secondly, the program used to generate the initial latitude-longitude locations did not yield locations as precise as the original file information would allow. Therefore, we reviewed the locations in the hard-copy files and 1) corrected the township, range, section, and within section location data in the spreadsheet, and 2) added information for wells that had been permitted under the Oil and Gas Conservation Act but not drilled. For most records the location in the original hard-copy files is in the form of township, range, section, distance from the north or south section line, and distance from the east or west section line. In other cases, especially for wells drilled prior to the Oil and Gas Conservation Act, that degree of detail is not available.
