DrillerDB Opens 10 Million Water Well Logs, 53 Million Rock Layers - Free for Researchers
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CHICAGO - illiNews -- DrillerDB has opened free record-level access to its Underground Lithology Grid for non-commercial academic and institutional research. The Grid contains more than 53 million rock and soil intervals parsed from over 10 million water well logs across 39 U.S. states and 6 Canadian provinces.

An analysis of nearly 1.4 million domestic wells in the database shows how construction has changed over fifty years. In the 2010s, the average new domestic well drilled in Colorado reached 360 feet - 152 feet deeper than in the 1970s. California increased 135 feet and Maine 139 feet, while Michigan and Wisconsin changed little. Well depth describes how wells are constructed, not the depth of the water table.

Every water well log captures what the driller encountered - clay, sand, gravel, shale, and other materials. State and provincial agencies preserved and published these public records, but terminology varies widely. DrillerDB assigned 51.3 million intervals to one controlled lithology vocabulary while preserving the original driller wording alongside more than 99 percent of intervals.

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Standardization is overwhelmingly deterministic: 96.5 percent of intervals are coded by a curated dictionary, under 1 percent are AI-assigned, and 1.7 percent remain explicitly uncoded rather than guessed. In an independent audit of 1,000 coded intervals, 96 percent matched the original description, 3 percent were partially correct, and fewer than 1 percent were wrong.

The dataset also has limits. Driller descriptions come from cuttings at the rig, depths carry uncertainty, detail concentrates in water-bearing zones, and wells are not distributed like a scientific sampling grid.

"These are drillers' descriptions of what came up the hole. We standardized them across North America while keeping the original descriptions available for researcher comparison," said Craig Vander Galien, founder of DrillerDB. "We would rather see this drive research than sit in our database."

Researchers can review the terms and apply at https://drillerdb.com/research. The public can explore mapped well records at https://drillerdb.com/well-map.

About DrillerDB

DrillerDB builds business management software for water well drilling contractors and maintains more than 18 million well records across the United States and Canada.