NDIC well lookup, explained: finding a North Dakota well and what the record won't tell you

The North Dakota Industrial Commission, Oil and Gas Division (Bismarck) is the regulator of record for every oil and gas well in North Dakota, 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 North Dakota well carries an API number beginning 33-: 33 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 NDIC Oil and Gas Division's well search and GIS map server 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. NDIC statuses run A (active), IA (inactive), TA (temporarily abandoned), PA (plugged), DRL (drilling), CONF (confidential), LOC (location) and so on; the map folds them into the same producing / permitted / spudded / plugged groups it uses everywhere. 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 (county 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 North Dakota 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.