Who Owns Oil Rights in the Gulf of Mexico? Use our tool to find out!
This post also appears on Extract-A-Fact
Always on the lookout for interesting data, I was excited when I recently came across a comprehensive trove of data on offshore production in the Gulf of Mexico from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).The datasets at data.boem.gov include:
- Oil production by lease, back to 1996
- Owners for every active lease, dating to the 1940s
- Characteristics for every active lease, including royalty rates, rent, and bid amounts
- Geospatial data with data for every lease block
However, because the data is interspersed between four datasets, it is downright complicated to find out which leases a company owns, what the lease attributes are, and how much oil and gas has been produced from the lease. With that in mind, I have created an interactive map application that combines the geographic data, the ownership data, and the production data into one easy-to-use tool.
See the full-sized map here
This map allows the user to view:
- the leases owned by some of the biggest leaseholders in the Gulf of Mexico
- which leases produced oil and/or gas in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and how much
- all the owners of a lease by percentage
- the royalty rate on the lease
I created the map using Carto, an online platform for mapping and analysis, and used their Javascript library, Carto.js, to add custom features. I cleaned and merged the BOEM data using R into a usable format for the application. The data is hosted on the Carto website at pwypusa.carto.com ; it can be viewed and downloaded there.
Take a look at the map, hosted on our Github page at the following link: https://pwypusa.github.io/pages/gulf_explorer.html
Click around and let us know what you find out, here or on Twitter @PWYPUSA!