In January 1862, Colorado's entire oil industry was one well near Cañon City, hauling a few barrels a day out by ox-team. Today the state's database holds nearly 90,000 wellbores with a recorded spud date. Press play and watch the basins fill in: one spud at a time.
Every dot is a wellbore, placed where it was drilled and lit at the year it was spudded. Older wells glow dim copper; newer ones burn brighter. Drag the slider or press play to move through time: the chart under the map keeps pace, and the tall bars are the booms.
A well blooms at its spud year and never leaves the map, so plugged and abandoned wells remain, which is the point. The shape of Colorado's oil and gas story emerges not from geology textbooks but from the wells themselves: the Front Range anticlines, the far-northwest corner that boomed during the war, and the great knot between Denver and Greeley that never stopped growing.
The first ninety years look nearly empty: partly because drilling was sparse, and partly because the state's records only reach back so far: the early Florence and Boulder booms survive on paper, not in the database. Then the modern record opens and the pattern sets in: each boom paints one corner of the map. The D-sand plays scatter across the eastern plains in the fifties. Wattenberg thickens into a dense knot after 1970, coalbed methane lights the southern basins in the late eighties, the Piceance erupts in the 2000s, and then, after 2009, the horizontal era concentrates everything into fewer, bigger wells in Weld County.
Every dot is a real well from the public well-spot database of the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission (formerly COGCC), downloaded June 2026: one dot per wellbore with surface coordinates and a recorded spud date, 89,913 in all. Permitted-but-never-drilled locations are excluded. One honest gap: the database thins out before about 1950, so the earliest chapters (Florence's hundreds of holes, the 1901 Boulder boom) are told in the annotations rather than shown in dots. Historical milestones are drawn from the Colorado Encyclopedia, 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, century-old deeds, leases, pooling, royalty math. That's mineral title, and it's what we teach.
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