Walking the 94% dark.

419,777 drilled wells.

That is the full Kansas oil-and-gas record, stripped of permits that never became holes in the ground. Every ghost dot on the map is one of them.

Paper status (Approved Intent, Expired Intent, Cancelled API) is excluded. The count is the surface footprint of a century of subsurface effort.

Of that record, lit.

23,897 wells have a publicly-accessible LAS, the machine-readable log format that analysts actually load. The other 395,880 are dark. You can see the lit ones now: clay for the 2000s, violet for 2010+, amber for anything older.

Dark is when, not where.

Every decade from the 1920s through the 1990s sits at 1–3% LAS coverage. The 2000s: 14%. The 2010s: 37%. Digital filing became the default once the horizontal-drilling generation arrived, and most of Kansas was drilled long before.

Watch the lit dots concentrate in the western and southeastern edges. That is where the 21st century happened.

A stratigraphy of operator behaviour.

County-level LAS coverage now shades the state. Johnson County, drilled in the 1920s and 1930s: 0.2% of 4,171 wells digitized. Wichita County, drilled post-2000: 43% of 447. Same state, two centuries of filing norms.

39 of 98 counties with 50+ wells sit below 5% coverage. The east is the old oil patch; the west is where the log survives.

One operator, 37% of a region.

Zoom to the red cluster in the southeast: eleven counties, 81,293 drilled wells, 4,316 lit. River Rock Operating (successor to the Quest Cherokee CBM estate) holds 1,582 of those 4,316. When one operator owns most of the log archive, the region’s “public” archive is effectively that operator’s archive.

Has no current operator.

182,153 of the 395,880 dark Kansas wells are orphan: the Current Operator field is blank. Last operator gone, no successor, no archive. The single largest holder of dark wells in the state is nobody.

The remaining named dark wells sit on a long tail. The top 10 named operators hold only 14% of the named dark universe.