How Many Oil Wells Are in the US? The Final EIA Count

The United States had 918,481 producing oil and natural gas wells in 2024, according to the Energy Information Administration. EIA classed 400,039 of them as oil wells and 518,442 as gas wells. The total peaked at 1,031,161 in 2014, and 78% of the 2024 wells produce 15 barrels of oil equivalent a day or less: stripper wells.

That 2024 figure is the end of the line for this series. EIA announced that, effective October 15, 2026, it stopped updating its report on oil and natural gas wells by production rate, which makes the December 8, 2025 release, with data through 2024, the final edition. No future year will replace these numbers in the same form. Between the 2014 peak and 2024, the count fell by 112,680 wells, while the number of horizontal wells rose from 100,401 to 199,163, or from 10% of all producing wells to 22%.

Two numbers in that first paragraph are worth holding together. Nearly four in five wells are small, yet those wells produce only about one barrel in seventeen. Most of the country’s oil comes from a few tens of thousands of newer horizontal wells, many of them in the basins covered in the US oil production by state ranking. The rest of the well count is a long tail of old, slow wells, many in states that produce little oil at all.

What EIA counted, and what it left out

The count is narrower and stranger than the word “well” suggests. EIA built it from state administrative records of monthly well-level or lease-level production, which it receives through the commercial data provider Enverus. The report counts five kinds of producing entity: a single wellhead, a sidetrack, a completion, a recompletion and a lease. When a state reports production only by lease and the number of wells on the lease is known, EIA splits the lease total equally among them. When only the lease is known, the lease counts once, which EIA says undercounts wells in some areas.

Only producing entities are in it. EIA excluded storage wells, dry holes and wells producing only within carbon dioxide fields, and it counts injection wells only for years in which they once produced. A well that sat shut in for all of 2024 is not in the 2024 count. Plugged and abandoned wells are not in it either; they are a much larger population, covered further down.

The split between oil wells and gas wells is a ratio test, not a label from the operator. EIA converts each well’s annual gas to barrels of oil equivalent at 6,000 cubic feet per barrel. If the gas-oil ratio is 6,000 cubic feet per barrel or less, the well is an oil well for that year; above it, a gas well. A well can move between the two as its output changes, so the oil-well count for a given year is a description of that year’s production. A practical result: a question about “oil wells” has two honest answers, 400,039 oil wells by EIA’s ratio rule or 918,481 wells that produce oil, gas or both. Most produce some of each.

The production volumes also differ from EIA’s headline supply series. Summed across wells, the 2024 data hold 4,842 million barrels of oil and lease condensate, about 13.23 million barrels a day, while EIA’s own overview of the report puts 2024 oil production at 13.4 million barrels a day. EIA’s note to the tables lists the reasons: the timing of state and commercial updates, well-level sums versus state-level totals, and how wells are defined. Use this dataset for counts and distributions, and the monthly supply series for production totals.

Producing wells from 2000 to 2024

The national count rose every year from 2000 to 2014 and flattened in 2015. It has mostly fallen since, with small increases in 2022 and 2023 before a fall in 2024. Table 1 shows the full run, with the share of wells at or below 15 barrels of oil equivalent a day and the number of horizontal wells.

From the 2014 peak to 2024 the count fell by 112,680 wells, or 10.9%. The fall did not come from the new kind of well. Horizontal wells rose from 100,401 to 199,163 over the same decade, while everything else, mostly vertical and directional wells, fell from 930,760 to 719,318. Put plainly, the country lost about 211 thousand older wells and gained about 99 thousand horizontal ones.

The last year shows the same pattern at small scale. Between 2023 and 2024, the total fell by 11,964 wells while horizontal wells rose by 9,247. Oil in the well-level data still rose, from 4,726 million to 4,842 million barrels. A shrinking well count next to rising output is not a contradiction. It is what happens when each new well replaces several old ones in barrels while not replacing them one for one in number.

The 2000 starting point is useful too. In that year EIA’s data show 730,303 producing wells, only 9,744 of them horizontal, and 2,116 million barrels of oil. By 2024 the count was 26% higher and the oil volume 129% higher. The mix of wells changed far more than their number.

What counts as a stripper well

“Stripper well” and “marginal well” mean the same thing: a well producing small volumes late in its life, often for decades. The term has more than one official threshold, which is why articles that quote “stripper well” numbers do not always agree. EIA’s FAQ for the report sets out the two most common definitions and says which one it uses.

The differences matter at the margin. EIA’s bracket adds a well’s oil and its gas together, while the IOGCC and IRS tests are stated as oil or gas. Two illustrative wells, with production chosen for the example, show how the same well can land on either side.

Two wells, three verdicts

Well A produces 12 barrels of oil a day and 30,000 cubic feet of gas a day. Its gas is worth 30,000 ÷ 6,000 = 5 barrels of oil equivalent, so EIA would place it at 17 barrels of oil equivalent a day, outside the 15 BOE/d stripper bracket. By the IRS oil test, 12 barrels a day is under 15, so it would be a stripper well by that rule, but not by the IOGCC’s 10-barrel threshold.

Well B is a gas well producing 80,000 cubic feet a day and no liquids. That is 80,000 ÷ 6,000 = 13.3 barrels of oil equivalent, inside EIA’s bracket, and under the 90,000 cubic feet figure EIA attaches to the IRS definition, but above the IOGCC’s 60,000. One well, three answers. When a source quotes a stripper well count, the first thing to check is which threshold it used.

By EIA’s bracket, the United States had 716,686 stripper wells in 2024. EIA’s FAQ says that together they produced approximately 6% of U.S. oil and natural gas that year. Recomputing from the workbook gives 5.9% of combined output in barrels of oil equivalent, and 5.6% of the oil alone, 270 million barrels. The two calculations agree. Those barrels are small as a share, but at about 737 thousand barrels a day they are more than many entire producing states make.

Small wells, small barrels: the 2024 distribution

EIA sorts every well into one of 22 brackets, from under 1 barrel of oil equivalent a day to more than 12,800. Grouped into six bands, the 2024 brackets show how lopsided the distribution is. This is the single most useful view in the dataset, because it answers the question behind most well-count searches: if there are so many wells, where does the oil come from?

The bottom band is the striking one. 339,939 wells, 37.0% of the total, averaged less than one barrel of oil equivalent a day and together made 0.3% of output. The band holds every kind of tail entity: wells that produced for only part of the year at low rates, wells on leases where EIA split a small lease total among many wells, and gas wells on long, slow declines. Table 4 shows where small wells dominate the count: in Kansas, Michigan and New York, more than 98% of producing wells sit at 15 barrels of oil equivalent a day or less. At the other end, 69,086 wells producing more than 100 barrels of oil equivalent a day, 7.5% of the count, made 78.4% of output. The 2,373 wells above 1,600 barrels of oil equivalent a day, fewer than three in a thousand, produced 16.1% on their own.

Two cautions apply. First, a bracket is an annual average. EIA divides a well’s annual output by the calendar days it was in production, using the productive months for the first and last years of a well’s life. A new shale well that starts at several hundred barrels a day and falls steeply will sit in a high bracket in its first year and a lower one later. Second, EIA’s FAQ puts the average 2024 oil well at 29 barrels a day of oil, or about 39 barrels of oil equivalent with its gas, and the average gas well at nearly 185,000 cubic feet a day, about 35 barrels of oil equivalent. Those averages describe almost no actual well, because the distribution is so skewed. The median well is far smaller than the mean.

The state table

Table 4 gives every state and federal offshore area in EIA’s final edition, ordered by producing wells. The column for small wells’ share of output is the one most summaries leave out, and it changes how the counts read.

Five states, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Kansas and New Mexico, hold 560,544 wells, or 61% of the national count. Texas alone has 30.6%. The federal offshore Gulf of America has only 2,216 producing wells, yet in 2024 it produced 656 million barrels of oil in the well-level data, more than any state except Texas and New Mexico. Alaska is similar: 2,352 wells and 154 million barrels. Counting wells and counting barrels produce two different maps of the industry.

Four states that break the national pattern

Kansas: the stripper well state

Kansas had 65,607 producing wells in 2024, the fourth-most in the country, and 99.0% of them were at 15 barrels of oil equivalent a day or less. Those small wells produced 85.3% of the state’s oil and gas. EIA’s data show only 16 horizontal wells in Kansas. This is what an older, conventional oil province looks like: tens of thousands of wells, each pumping a few barrels a day, with almost no shale-style development to dilute them.

Pennsylvania: many gas wells, a few giants

Pennsylvania ranks second by well count, with 84,427 wells, 73,475 of them gas wells. 86.4% are small, a higher share than the national average, yet those small wells made only 1.1% of the state’s output. The reason is the Marcellus and Utica shale gas development. The 11,466 wells above the stripper line, almost all of them horizontal (the state has 11,950 horizontal wells in all), produce about 99% of its 7,464 billion cubic feet of gas and its oil. The state has two well populations that barely overlap: a large stock of older conventional wells and a modern shale fleet.

North Dakota: a horizontal state

North Dakota turns the national ratio upside down. Only 19.8% of its 20,871 wells were small in 2024, and 92.2% were horizontal. Its 438 million barrels of oil in the well-level data came from fewer wells than Louisiana or Wyoming has. A Bakken well count tells you about new drilling and completions; a Kansas well count tells you about old fields still pumping.

California and New York: old fields, different products

California had 46,766 wells, 42,130 of them oil wells, the third-most after Texas and Kansas. Small wells there made 42.9% of output, the highest share of any state producing more than 100 million barrels of oil in the well-level data, and 45% of its oil alone. California’s count is mostly oil wells with little gas, the reverse of Pennsylvania. New York had 10,494 wells, 99.8% of them small, producing 9 billion cubic feet of gas, or less than one cubic foot in four thousand of the national total.

Why rig counts and well counts tell different stories

People often treat the Baker Hughes rig count and the well count as two versions of the same thing. They measure different parts of a chain. The rig count is a weekly snapshot of rigs drilling new holes. The well count is a yearly tally of entities that produced. Between them sit three conversions, each with its own lag.

1. Rigs to wells drilled. A rig on a multi-well pad drills one well after another, so the wells drilled per rig per year depend on lateral length, pad design and crew speed.
2. Wells drilled to wells completed. A drilled well produces nothing until it is completed, and it can wait for months. That inventory is the subject of the drilled but uncompleted wells guide.
3. Completed wells to the producing stock. Each completed well joins the count, and each old well that stops producing for a full year leaves it. The count is a stock, the net of both flows.

The well count therefore moves slowly and for reasons a rig count cannot see. From 2014 to 2024, the number of horizontal wells grew in every single year, including 2016 and 2020, years when drilling fell hard. Completions of wells drilled earlier kept adding to the horizontal stock. At the same time, the total fell because exits from the old, low-rate tail outnumbered new entries. A falling well count is not evidence of falling activity, and a steady rig count is not evidence of a steady stock.

Production follows a third logic. New horizontal wells start at high rates and decline steeply in their first years, so the country needs a steady flow of new completions just to hold output flat. The price that flow requires is the subject of the shale breakeven price analysis, and the regional output per rig is tracked in the Drilling Productivity Report guide. Stripper wells behave the other way: low rates, slow declines, and sensitivity to price and operating costs, since a well making three barrels a day has little margin for a bad year. That makes the long tail a slow-moving cushion rather than a driver of short-term supply.

After the last barrel: plugged and abandoned wells

The 918,481 wells in the EIA count are the living part of a much larger population. Every well that ever produced and has since stopped is outside the report. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that population for its greenhouse gas inventory, because unplugged wells can leak methane.

In a September 2021 memo setting out updates under consideration for the 2022 inventory, EPA estimated about 3,440 thousand abandoned oil and gas wells in 2019: 2,842 thousand oil wells and 599 thousand gas wells. That figure combines abandoned wells in the Enverus database with an estimated 1.1 million historical wells not in the database, a figure EPA developed from state databases and the U.S. Geological Survey for 1975. EPA also treated those historical wells as unplugged when estimating emissions. The memo describes a proposal at that stage, and later inventories revise these counts, so treat it as an order of magnitude: roughly 3.5 abandoned wells for every well producing in 2019.

“Abandoned” in EPA’s sense covers both plugged wells and unplugged ones. The low-rate tail in Table 3 is where most future abandonments come from. A well producing under one barrel a day is one bad year, or one failed operator, away from joining the larger population, which is why stripper well economics and plugging liabilities are often discussed together.

Using the final edition after EIA stopped updating it

Because the series has ended, the December 2025 release becomes a fixed reference point, and some care keeps it useful. Three practices help.

Cite the year, not “current.” The count is 918,481 producing wells in 2024. It is not the number of wells today, and nothing in this series will update it. A sentence such as “EIA counted 918,481 producing oil and gas wells in 2024, its final edition” will stay true; “the U.S. has 918,481 wells” will drift out of date.

Watch the late-reporting states. Kentucky, Tennessee, Arizona, Missouri and Maryland rows repeat older years, and Illinois and Indiana are absent. Any state comparison should say so.

Know where EIA sent its users. In its discontinuation notice, EIA points to its natural gas and petroleum data navigators for drilling activity and well metrics such as footage drilled, average depth and cost per well; the Short-Term Energy Outlook for regional drilling productivity; the Petroleum Supply Monthly and Annual for crude production; and the Natural Gas Monthly and Annual for gas production. None of these sorts wells by production rate, so for that question the final edition, and its Appendix C full datasheet, remain the national source. For state-level production since 2024, the state ranking uses EIA’s monthly supply data, and for the reserves behind the wells, see US oil reserves explained.

The most durable lesson from the final edition is about proportion. A country with nearly a million producing wells gets most of its oil and gas from fewer than seventy thousand of them. When a headline cites a rising or falling well count, ask which part of that distribution moved.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Oil and Natural Gas Wells by Production Rate, release date December 8, 2025, with the discontinuation notice effective October 15, 2026, checked October 30, 2026 (2014 peak of 1,031,161 wells, 930,445 in 2023, 918,481 in 2024, horizontal share, 2024 oil production of 13.4 million barrels a day, data sources and late-reporting states). EIA, Appendix B: Selected summary tables, Tables B1 to B58, data available as of November 2025, checked October 30, 2026 (every well count and volume on this page). EIA, Appendix A, checked October 30, 2026 (state reporting status). EIA, Frequently Asked Questions and Methodology, checked October 30, 2026 (stripper well definitions, the 6% production share, average well rates, well types, exclusions, gas-oil ratio rule, rate calculation). U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Updates Under Consideration for the 2022 GHGI: Abandoned Wells (September 2021), Table 2, checked October 30, 2026 (abandoned well estimate for 2019). Groupings, shares, BOE conversions and differences are this page’s arithmetic, computed by script from the EIA workbook.