I wanted to explore data that involved the potential for hazard or environmental risk. With rising oil prices today, I decided it may be good to look at oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania. I downloaded two datasets that were created by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection; Oil and Gas Well locations from 1996, and the most recent file from 2022. While previewing the data, what’s noticeable is the astonishing amount of oil and gas well locations in the state.

I decided it would be good to summarize the quantities by counties. I wanted to create visualizations for both 1996 and 2022. Next, I wanted to visualize the increase over this 26 year period. Finally, I wanted to see which county had the highest percentage increase from their original amount of wells in 1996.

The comparisons above use the same classification levels to show the true increase over this time. Right away, there are a few observations to make:

• The number of counties with more than 5,000 wells has greatly increased (from 4 counties to 13).
• Oil and gas wells have expanded eastward in the state.

This is of no surprise to me. With knowledge on the natural gas expansion in not only Pennsylvania, but the entire United States, this was expected. For further analysis, it is worth exploring the actual increase per county over this time period.

With no surprise, most counties gained oil and gas wells over this time period. What is worth highlighting here is the fact that there are six counties that have gained over 5,000 wells. Also an important note here, is that some counties went from almost zero wells to over 1,000. This includes counties like Tioga, Lycoming, Bradford, and Susquehanna. As another form of measure, the percentage difference between 1996 and 2022 was visualized, as seen below.

All in all, there are a number of observations to be made from this analysis:

• With technological advances in natural gas, oil and gas wells have exploded with growth across the state of Pennsylvania. Total wells in 1996 were 67,271 and in 2022 there are 200,687.
• There has been high expansion in existing counties; such as McKean, Venango, and Warren Counties which all saw an increase of over 10,000 wells.
• Further expansion continued east into counties with previously had few to zero oil and gas wells; such as Susquehanna County which went from 0 wells to 3,114 total.
• Erie County shows a decrease in wells, which may result from a difference in dataset formats from the two time periods.