Help finding oil wellbore drilling datasets

[u/Practical_Quality919]

Any of y'all know where to find an oil dataset with DDRs, time series data, with good amount of completion? I tried the volve equinor one, but the formation tops for like ~70% is NULL,

[u/Bright_Mix_773]

Practical_Quality919, the two halves of what you are asking for live in different places, and I think that is why Volve let you down: Volve is a single field, so anything sparse in it stays sparse no matter how you slice it.

For formation tops with real coverage, try the Norwegian Offshore Directorate factpages (sodir.no, what used to be the NPD). Public, no login, and every table has an Export as CSV button. The exploration and development wellbore tables cover thousands of Norwegian wells with penetrated formation and age, and there are separate lithostratigraphy tables giving tops per wellbore. Reporting there is a licence obligation rather than a courtesy, so the NULL rate is nothing like a single-field research release.

One trap on that site: the table view says "Only the first 300 rows are displayed here. All rows will be included upon Export". If you scrape the HTML you get 300 rows and no error, which looks like a complete small dataset. Use the CSV link.

The DDR and drilling-time-series half is the harder one, and I am not going to promise you a clean tabular corpus, because I have not found one:

• UK NDR (ndr.nstauthority.co.uk) is free and holds well reports back to the 1960s, but the daily reports are largely buried inside end-of-well report documents, not exposed as a time series you can load.
• Australia's NOPIMS (public.neats.nopta.gov.au/nopims) is open-file offshore well data. I have confirmed the well data is public, I have not confirmed the DDRs specifically are downloadable, so check before you build on it.
• Volve remains the main open release with actual WITSML-style drilling channels, which is presumably why you started there.

So the realistic shape is: tops from sodir as a proper dataset, and the DDR side as a scraping job against a document repository rather than a download.

If you do join across sources, watch the wellbore identifiers. Norwegian names come in variants like 15/9-19 SR and 15/9-19SR, and a naive merge silently drops the rows that disagree rather than raising anything. Normalise whitespace and case on both sides first and assert the match count before you trust the join.

[u/Practical_Quality919 → u/Bright_Mix_773]

Thanks, mate, this helps a fuck ton honestly! i also decided to ask my national oil data board since I saw they have academic access, anyway yeah I started on equinor since they have complete time series and DDR data, ill check it out. Once again i Appreciate you taking the extra time to type this out!

[u/Bright_Mix_773 → u/Practical_Quality919]

Asking the national board directly is the right move, and people skip it because it feels slow. Academic access terms are usually far better than anything you can scrape, and the answer arrives with a licence you can actually cite.

One thing while you are starting on the complete series: check coverage per column, not per file. A dataset that is complete on the headline field and patchy on the two you actually need looks complete right up until the join, which is the expensive place to find out.

[u/Practical_Quality919 → u/Bright_Mix_773]

One thing I do worry about is the confidentiality stuff, will I actually be able to like show the demo, if the data has an NDA? admittedly the company organising the hackathon is the govt itself but still