MBOGC well lookup, explained: finding a Montana well and what the record won't tell you

The Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation (Billings) is the regulator of record for every oil and gas well in Montana, and its website is where the public record lives: permits, well files, status changes, production and spacing orders. It is thorough. It is also organised for regulators and operators, not for the person holding a check stub, so here is the map.

The API number is the key

Every Montana well carries an API number beginning 25-: 25 is the state, the next three digits are the county and the last five identify the well. Operators print it on stubs and division orders. If you have it, every page of the MBOGC online well data (search by API or well name) and the Board's weekly letters will take it. If you only have a well name, search by name and county, but be ready for several wells that share a name across different sections.

What the well record contains

• Status. MBOGC statuses distinguish producing, shut-in, temporarily abandoned, plugged and permitted wells; the map uses the same producing / permitted / spudded / plugged groups it uses in every state. Montana has no daily spud feed, so recent spuds come from the Board's weekly letters. The status tells you whether a well is a payer, a promise or a memory.
• Location — surface hole and, for horizontals, the bottom hole. The bottom hole is often in a different section from the surface, which matters enormously to whoever owns minerals under the lateral.
• Production — oil, gas and water volumes as reported by the operator, usually a few months behind.
• Documents — the application for permit to drill, completion report, directional survey and sundry notices.

What it won't tell you by itself

Three things you will want that a single well page can't give you: which wells drain your tract (that lives in spacing orders, cross-referenced by section), who owns the minerals (clerk and recorder, and the BLM for federal), and what the area is doing — recent spuds, rigs on location, permits filed around you. Each of those is on the site somewhere; pulling them together for one section is the work.

A faster route

Oilstats.us loads the same public files — the well file, the production history and the spacing orders — and draws them on one map with your own tracts on top, for Montana and the four states around it. Click a section and you see every well, its status, production trend and unit; type a name or API and it takes you there. The regulator's record stays the authority; the map is the way to read it in seconds.