Geodatabase of oil and gas pads and roads within the Bureau of Land Management's Carlsbad Field Office administrative boundary, New Mexico

This database contains spatial data on the location, number, size and extent of energy-related surface disturbances within the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Carlsbad Field Office (CFO) administrative area. The BLM administers over 2 million acres of surface estate and 3 million acres of mineral estate in the southeastern portion of New Mexico. The BLM requires a thorough and comprehensive reasonable foreseeable development (RFD) scenario which quantifies the current and future potential of oil and gas resources and the necessary water use associated with those activities. The database includes: 1) polygons of oil and gas pads generated from automated and manual classification of aerial imagery, 2) polylines of roads derived from the U.S. Census Bureau (2020) TIGER/Line Shapefile, supplemented with additional oil and gas access roads digitized from aerial imagery, 3) point locations of active and abandoned oil and gas wells in the CFO area accessed from NM Oil Conservation Division (OCD) geodata portal, and 4) a set of relationship classes that link the pad polygons to the well points (and all associated well attributes) based on unique identifiers. Pad polygons and road segments are attributed with a "spud year" date based on spud information from the nearest well point. Spudding is the process of beginning to drill a well in the oil and gas industry, and the spud year is a close approximation of when the access roads and pads were cleared for development. The spud year information can be used to develop a chronology of oil and gas surface disturbances across the study region.