In 1902, Alaska's oil was a single hole on the Gulf coast. A half-century of dry wildcats followed, until Swanson River hit in 1957 and Prudhoe Bay in 1968 turned the territory into a petro-state. Press play and watch its two great oil patches — the North Slope and Cook Inlet — fill in, one spud at a time.
Alaska's oil lives in two places hundreds of miles apart, with near-empty country between them — so rather than one mostly-blank statewide map, this draws the two producing regions as panels side by side: the North Slope on the left, Cook Inlet on the right. They share one clock. Drag the slider or press play and both regions advance through the same year together.
Every dot is a wellbore, placed where it was drilled and lit at the year it was spudded. Older wells glow dim, newer ones burn bright. A well blooms at its spud year and never leaves the map, so plugged and abandoned wells stay — which is the point. The chart under the map keeps pace; the tall bars are the booms.
For fifty years the map barely flickers: a thin scatter of dry wildcats around Cook Inlet. Then 1957 changes everything — Richfield's Swanson River strike on the Kenai Peninsula opens Alaska's first commercial field and, two years later, helps justify statehood. The Cook Inlet panel thickens through the sixties as offshore platforms go up.
The northern panel sits empty until 1968, when Prudhoe Bay — the largest oil field in North America — is confirmed on the Arctic coast. After the pipeline opens in 1977, the North Slope erupts: Prudhoe, then Kuparuk, then a string of satellites spreading west toward the Colville. Drilling peaks in the mid-eighties, output peaks in 1989, and then the slope matures — fewer wells, each one longer and deeper, edging toward the western reserves.
Every dot is a real wellbore from the public database of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC): one dot per well with surface coordinates and a recorded spud date (completion date where no spud is recorded). This map focuses on Alaska's two producing regions — the North Slope and the Cook Inlet basin — which together hold the overwhelming majority of the state's wells. A scattering of remote wildcats elsewhere (the Aleutians, the Interior, the Gulf coast where Katalla's 1902 field stood) falls outside both panels and is told in the annotations rather than shown in dots. Historical milestones are drawn from the Alaska Oil & Gas Historical Society, USGS, and contemporary accounts.
Before any of these wells was drilled, somebody had to answer a deceptively hard question: who owns the minerals under this ground, and who gets paid? Severed estates, old deeds, leases, pooling, royalty math. That's mineral title, and it's what we teach.
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