The U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water Information System (NWIS) created an interactive tool that maps water resources data at over 1.5 million sites across the country. The search tool allows the user to find sites by street address, location name, site number, state/territory, and watershed region. The sites are sorted into five main categories:
The National Ground-Water Monitoring Network compiles information from over 7,000 groundwater monitoring wells across the country, including Federal, State, and local groundwater monitoring networks. Although the image above only shows the contiguous United States, the interactive map also includes wells from Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides an interactive map of hazardous waste cleanups across the United States. The "Cleanups in My Community" map provides a huge amount of information on thousands of cleanups of many kinds. For every cleanup, users can access and download reports, assessments, compliance actions, and the EPA's assessment of the potential for any contaminated land to be used for renewable energy development.
The National Pipeline Mapping System (NPMS) Public Viewer from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration allows users to view pipelines and related information by individual county for the entire United States. The map includes:
The U.S. Geological Survey's National Coal Resources Data System comes with an interactive map that provides a huge amount of information on the distribution, thickness, and classification of coal in the United States.
The interactive map contains over 250,000 data points, each typically representing a core sample, drill hole, or driller's log in a specific location. You can use the "Filter" tool to focus in on specific areas, or on data collected by specific organizations. Commonly available data include:
The U.S. Geological Survey provides an interactive map of historical oil and gas production in the United States from 1859 to 2005, including Alaska and Hawaii. In this map, the country is split into quarter-mile cells and the production status of all wells in that cell are aggregated for each time period.
The map can be filtered to show oil and gas production pre-1900, for each decade of the 20th century, and for 2000-2005.
The U.S. Geological Survey's interactive map, "Energy In Our Nation," provides a wide range of information on energy resources in the United States, including:
The U.S. Geological Survey's interactive windFarm map provides detailed information on wind farms across the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii.
By zooming in on the map, users can find the precise location of tens of thousands of individual turbines, with information for each turbine including the owner, generating capacity, on-line date, type of tower, blade length, total height, and the confidence with which this information can be given.
The surge in recent years of earthquake activity associated with some oil and gas operations, most notably in Oklahoma, has spurred a range of actions and responses from state geoscientists and regulators. States have taken measures to monitor these earthquakes and moderate the activities that may be causing them, particularly the deep underground injection of large volumes of wastewater. Many states with extensive oil and gas operations but little or no increased earthquake activity have also adopted practices to prevent and prepare for potential induced earthquakes in their area.
Our speakers are:
Jeremy Boak, Ph.D., Director, Oklahoma Geological Survey, Mewbourne College of Earth & Energy, University of Oklahoma | SlidesVideo
Michael H. Young, Ph.D., Associate Director for Environment, Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, John A. and Katherine G. Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin | SlidesVideo
Steven Dade, Geologist 2, Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Oil & Gas Resources Management | SlidesVideo
The U.S. Energy Information Administration provides an interactive map showing the major tight oil and shale gas plays in the lower 48 states.
Tight oil and shale gas are two of the main types of "unconventional" oil and gas resources, and played an important role in the early-21st-century resurgence in domestic production of oil (beginning around 2009) and natural gas (beginning around 2006).