About

Originally released in 2016, the FracTracker Allegheny Lease Map is completely updated with a new and improved user interface. This new dataset provides records of 269,370 agreements with oil and gas companies over 33,923 parcels in Allegheny County, totalling 152,642 acres, or about 32% of the county’s landmass.

This new application includes entries from the Allegheny County’s Department of Real Estate Office website that were not included in the original iteration because parcel IDs necessary for mapping were previously not included for parcels after 2010. This issue was fixed, and the missing data was backfilled thanks to work from Allegheny County District 3 Council Representative Anita Prizio.



Legal Disclaimer: The FracTracker Alliance (“FracTracker”) has collected the information in this lease records database and produced the resulting maps for informational purposes only. FracTracker cannot provide any assurance that the information provided in this lease records database or the resulting maps is accurate, reliable, or up-to-date. In addition, the information in this lease records database and the resulting maps should not be considered an assessment of property rights nor should anyone consider the content within this database and the resulting maps as legal advice. If you have questions about property rights or the legal status of property or a person’s property rights, you should consult an attorney and/or official records. As such, FracTracker is not responsible for errors contained in the maps or lease records database, nor is FracTracker in any way responsible for the use of the information provided in this lease records database. FracTracker assumes no liability for any errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in the information provided regardless of the cause of such or for any decision made, action taken, or action not taken by the user in reliance on any maps or data provided herein. (Source: Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services)

History

ⓘ This section explores the history of fossil fuel extraction in Allegheny County, tracing its impact from early coal mining to modern shale drilling. Learn how industrial development shaped the region.

History of Fossil Fuels in Allegheny County

The history of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is intertwined with that of resource extraction. Many visitors to the area may be unaware that Pittsburgh’s iconic Mount Washington was originally named “Coal Hill,” due to accessible outcroppings of the Pittsburgh coal seam. These and other deposits were already discovered by the time a young George Washington visited on a diplomatic mission, unsuccessfully inviting the French to abandon the disputed region in the buildup to the French and Indian War.

The U.S. petroleum industry got its start in Pennsylvania a little more than a century later. The Drake Well in Titusville, PA is credited as the first commercial oil well drilled in the country. At its peak in the late 19th Century, Pennsylvania wells were producing one third of the world’s oil. Oil and gas took their place alongside coal in fueling industrial development locally and nationally.

Unregulated Growth and its Environmental Legacy

In the early days of oil and gas development there was little to no regulation. It was not uncommon to find wells in the backyards of small urban parcels as additional hydrocarbon deposits were discovered. This was also at a time when pollution ran unchecked. Concerns for public health and the environment that took root in actions like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were not yet present. While the region’s air and water quality is significantly improved from those days, it still lags behind other similar sized metropolitan regions throughout the country, in part due to the legacy of extraction-dependent industries like power plants and steel manufacturing.

Detail from a Frank Robbins stereographic view of the west side of Triumph Hill, “showing buildings, storage tanks, and derricks, as well as two children sitting in chairs outside a building on Triumph Hill, near Tidioute, Pennsylvania.” (Image Source: Library of Congress)

Marcellus Shale and Expanding Well Sites

Newer “unconventional” oil and gas wells drilled into the Marcellus and other shale formations have slowly encroached upon Allegheny County. There have been 202 of these wells drilled in Allegheny County since December 2008. In comparison, surrounding areas have seen substantially more development—Butler County to the north now has 720 wells; Washington County to the southwest has 2,174. A major difference between historical wells and newer unconventional wells is their scale. Unconventional well pads are major, temporary industrial sites that can exceed five acres in size. Drilling on these sites can also go on for months with multiple wells being hydraulically fractured on a single pad. Millions of gallons of water need to be trucked in, and millions of gallons of waste must be discarded. Flaring of gasses is often required at drill sites, which can produce noise and light pollution for nearby residents. Learn more about this process here.

Drilling rig in Loyalsock, PA. (Image Source: Peter Stern)

Weighing the Risks and Benefits of Unconventional Wells

Do these risks outweigh potential economic benefits? There are a variety of perspectives on the matter, but many feel that a new fossil fuel energy boom runs counter to the progress that the region has made in recent decades. While in most places regulations are now significantly more robust than they were in the early days of the oil and gas industry, drilling operators often fail to adhere to those standards. As of October 29th, 2024, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has issued 17,307 violations at unconventional wells.

The Purpose and Utility of Mapping Leases

Regardless of one’s perspective on oil and gas development, we believe it is important for communities to be able to make informed decisions about their future. Municipalities may wish to identify areas where drilling would be particularly burdensome for their residents and limit development through zoning ordinances. Others may wish to enter into dialogue with drilling companies before expensive permitting processes commence. Proactive planning can be difficult with existing tools, however. The PA DEP does publish locations of permitted and drilled wells, but these do not always predict future development. Meanwhile, information that could be used for planning can be largely inaccessible to those without the resources to do exhaustive legal research.

FracTracker’s Lease Mapping Project

FracTracker’s updated Allegheny County Lease Mapping Project provides a comprehensive list of land parcels leased or contracted to oil and gas companies for future development. It is an interactive tool for municipalities, land trusts, and community leaders to utilize when considering their relationships with the oil and gas industry. The project is also intended to assist individuals. For instance, people looking to purchase property may want to take proximity to oil and gas development into consideration alongside other factors like school districts and tax rates. While some may argue that the oil and gas extraction is in a period of dormancy, or even retraction, in Allegheny County, it is important to remember that the industry is cyclical in nature. 

We believe the Allegheny County Lease Mapping Project will assist a range of stakeholders in their long-term strategic planning efforts.

Analysis

ⓘ In FracTracker’s investigation, we were able to find records of 269,370 agreements with oil and gas companies over 33,923 parcels in Allegheny County, totaling 152,642 acres, or about 32% of the county’s landmass. This section contains some summary statistics about those agreements.

Leases and Other Agreements

This project contains a section that explains different types of oil and gas agreements in detail, and it might be useful to cross-reference that resource with this one, to better understand what some of the summaries contained here are referring to. But put simply, oil and gas leases are a contract between the mineral rights owner and a company that wishes to extract hydrocarbons underneath their property. It is also important to note that there are some other types of agreements that these companies sometimes make with landowners or mineral rights owners, such as easements and rights-of-way, allowing the companies to conduct certain activities on a given parcel of land.  

Many of the summaries discussed in this section discuss “agreement acres,” which is a bit more inclusive than “leased acres.” Altogether, we found 63 different agreement types made between energy companies and the parcel’s surface or mineral rights owners. Of these, there are really only two that indicate the signing of a new oil and gas lease“O & G” and “Lease”and one of those can also indicate other types of leases, such as this document involving a water withdrawal lease. This means that there is really only one type of agreement that specifically means a new lease has been signed, “O & G.”

Agreement Types Parcel Count Agreement Acres
O & G 30,518 144,554
ASGMT O & G 15,860 90,231
AMEND O & G 2,150 37,518
LEASE 982 27,382
DEED 2,762 25,463
RELEASE 779 23,063
AGREEMENT 3,024 19,841
BILL OF SALE 2,348 19,326
R OF W 915 15,855
PARTIAL DEED RELEASE 101 15,291
All Categories 33,923 152,642

Figure 1. The ten agreement types involving oil and gas companies that cover the largest acreage. “O & G” agreements are leases, as are “Lease” agreements, but these could include other types of leases, such as water extraction. Many categories would require looking at a copy of the deed to know if the parcel was leased for extraction or not. See the complete list.

However, there are a couple of points to be made here. First, “O & G” is the most frequent type of agreement that we came across, representing 30,518 parcels and 144,554 acres, representing 90% and 95% of their respective totals in this investigation. Second, quite a number of other agreements on our list refer to existing leases on the parcel, whether to extend, amend, or surrender such leases, for example. Most of these are located in the same parcels, however, so that when we count anything mentioning leases or O & G, we only add 50 parcels and 369 acres to the total.  

It is also not a given that the 3,355 parcels over 7,707 acres where we have other types of agreements aren’t leased for oil and gas extractionmerely that we don’t have evidence of it.  The Deeds Office mentions that the oldest deed book that they have online is number 3680, which contains various deeds from 1957 and 1958, and we know from various sources that oil and gas drilling has a significantly longer history in Allegheny County than that. 

Municipalities and School Districts

The City of Pittsburgh is not just the largest of the 130 municipalities in Allegheny County, it is also located right in the middle of it. Of course, Pittsburgh and the inner ring of suburbs are densely populated compared to the communities further out, and so it is not surprising that these more remote locations would be the target of unconventional oil and gas leasing. 

There are a number of reasons that make the outer ring more conducive to fracking, including the state’s 500-foot setback from homes for wells of this type, the necessity of adding gathering pipelines to connect these gas wells to other infrastructure, and the logistics of organizing leases over multiple square miles of land for a single horizontal well is much easier where the parcels are larger.

Municipalitiy Agreement Acres Leased Acres Total Acres Percent With Agreements Percent Leased
Findlay 17,921 17,829 20,778 86.3% 85.8%
West Deer 13,140 13,120 18,448 71.2% 71.1%
Plum 12,637 12,489 18,542 68.2% 67.4%
Elizabeth Twp 11,353 11,263 15,851 71.6% 71.1%
Forward 11,330 11,260 12,697 89.2% 88.7%
Moon 9,497 9,278 15,349 61.9% 60.4%
North Fayette 8,319 8,178 16,116 51.6% 50.7%
Fawn 7,119 7,116 8,239 86.4% 86.4%
Frazer 5,638 5,633 6,014 93.8% 93.7%
Jefferson Hills 5,576 5,400 10,717 52.0% 50.4%
All Municipalities 152,642 144,923 476,226 32.1% 30.4%

Figure 2. The 10 municipalities with the largest number of agreement acres are all relatively far from the City of Pittsburgh and the central part of Allegheny County.  Note that for each location, the number of leased acres is only slightly less than the number of agreement acres.  See the complete list

It turns out that the question, “How many school districts are there in Allegheny County?” isn’t as simple to answer as one might think. If we look at the bottom of the website for Pittsburgh Public Schools, it informs us that it is the largest of 43 districts in the county, but if we download district data directly from the county, it shows 45 districts. And yet, we have data showing oil and gas agreements in 46 different districts in the county. Wikipedia agrees with this number, although the list is slightly different.  

So, what is going on here? It turns out that a small portion of two municipalities extend into Allegheny County from neighboring counties, and therefore, the school districts that those communities send their children to also overlap. This includes McDonald Borough and the Fort Cherry School District, which is mostly in Washington County, and Trafford Borough and the Penn-Trafford School District, which are mostly in Westmoreland County.  In addition, there are 18 properties in Allegheny County that report to Norwin School District, which like Penn-Trafford is mostly in Westmoreland. The Wikipedia list includes the long-defunct Edgewood School District, which was merged with Woodland Hills back in 1981, and does not include Norwin, accounting for the last of the anomalies.  

As it turns out, FracTracker has the most complete and accurate list of Allegheny County school districts of all of these sources, and all of them have at least some acres with oil and gas agreements registered with the Deeds Office.

Do you remember how I mentioned that we had accounted for all of the anomalies with school districts? Well, that was almost truenothing is allowed to be simple, I suppose. We also need to mention that there are slightly different totals for acreage for the county when calculating within municipal (476,226 acres) versus school district boundaries (475,959 acres). This is a difference of just 267 acres. This seems to be due to how the Fort Cherry district is shown on the map.

Figure x – The fort Cherry SD is shown here in blue.  FracTracker added the red line showing where the county boundary is located, accounting for the slight undercount of acreage within the county for this layer.

For the Penn-Trafford SD, the district was split into Allegheny and Westmoreland County portions, but that was not done with the Fort Cherry SD, leading to the slight undercount of total acres for this data layer within Allegheny County. The situation with Norwin SD slightly extending into parts of White Oak and South Versailles was ignored by this data layer completely.

With all of that out of the way, here are the 10 districts with the largest number of agreement acres.

School Districts Agreement Acres Leased Acres Total Acres Percent With Agreements Percent Leased
West Allegheny 26,242 26,007 37,192 70.6% 69.9%
Elizabeth Forward 22,728 22,567 27,807 81.7% 81.2%
Deer Lakes 19,656 19,426 26,057 75.4% 74.6%
Plum Boro 12,637 12,489 18,542 68.2% 67.4%
Moon Area 9,590 9,368 16,873 56.8% 55.5%
Highlands 8,969 8,750 14,506 61.8% 60.3%
West Jefferson Hills 5,973 5,774 12,653 47.2% 45.6%
South Fayette Twp 5,333 4,941 12,987 41.1% 38.0%
Fox Chapel Area 4,356 4,050 21,962 19.8% 18.4%
Montour 4,317 4,197 13,765 31.4% 30.5%
Grand Total 152,642 144,924 475,959 32.1% 30.4%

Figure 3. The 10 school districts with the largest number of agreement acres.  Most of these are in the same geographic area as the top 10 municipalities, but because there are fewer school districts than municipalities, the acreage values shown on this list tend to be larger.  See the complete list.

Ownership Type and Zoning

After all of that hassle with school districts, we decided to make things a bit simpler when it comes to classifying who owns the parcels. In the 33,923 parcels that we found with oil and gas agreements, the data from the Allegheny County Real Estate Office includes nine different ownership categories. However, that can be simplified into just two:  corporation owned, and “regular,” which appears to represent individuals or groups of individuals. 

Owner Type Agreement Acres Parcel Count Average Parcel Acres Average Parcel Sales Price
Corporation Owned Parcels 84,290.5 6,430 13.1 $473,578
Other Parcels 68,351.0 27,493 2.5 $94,740
All Agreement Parcels 152,641.6 33,923 4.5 $163,629

Figure 4. Oil and gas agreements by parcel ownership, including the most recent parcel sales price data. See the complete list.

Because the agreement acreage and leased acreage in the municipal and school district analyses were so close, we decided to forgo that calculation for the remaining charts in this section, giving us a chance to focus on other metrics. Here, we looked at the total number of agreement acres within each category, as well as the count of parcels in each. This allowed us to look at the average parcel size with agreements. Not surprisingly, the corporate owned parcels are more than five times larger than those owned by individuals, on average. We were also able to calculate the most recent sales price of these parcels, which is also about five times higher for corporate owned parcels.

Municipal zoning is a complicated topic that has a lot to do with how communities protect their residents from the oil and gas industry. In general, municipalities in the county can set up zoning in a way that makes sense to them, but the county will interpret those categories into a smaller number. Our investigation found oil and gas agreements in seven different zoning types around the county.

Zoning Type Agreement Acres Parcel Count Average Parcel Acres Average Parcel Sales Price
Agricultural 34634.2 899 38.5 $103,728
Commercial 26488.2 2,629 10.1 $864,063
Government 30199.7 591 51.1 $51,109
Industrial 5338.9 536 10.0 $537,784
Other 1147.8 24 47.8 $195,502
Residential 51820.7 29,084 1.8 $99,175
Utilities 3001.1 160 18.8 $30,906
All Agreement Parcels 152630.8 33,923 4.5 $163,629

Figure 5. Oil and gas agreements by zoning type. Download this table.

As with the ownership type analysis, we include calculations for average parcel size and the most recent average sales price.  Residential properties represent 86% of parcels and about 40% of the total acreage, leading both of those categories. The largest parcels with agreements tend to be government owned parcels, averaging about 51 acres, followed by “other,” at almost 48 acres per parcel.  

Since “other” is an unsatisfying category and there are relatively few of them, we can take a deeper dive into these 24 parcels by looking into the use description category. Sixteen of them (67%) are listed as “charitable exemption/HOS/homes.” Three parcels (13%) are listed as municipal government parcels—perhaps miscategorized, given that a government category also exists. The use description for the remaining five parcels include one each for “Coal land, surface rights”, “Coal rights, working interests”, “Mineral land”, “Oil & gas rights, working interest”, and “Single family.” The last of these seems like it should be residential, and the other four don’t really explain the zoning situation.  

Companies

To acquire data for this project, we started with a list of oil and gas companies that are known to be active in the region. The ten companies with the largest number of agreement acres are as follows:

Companies Parcel Count Agreement Acres
Range Resources 7983 90,216
CNX 12278 77,916
Huntley & Huntley 13119 68,993
EQT 14228 42,331
Noble Energy 6552 30,276
Bow & Arrow 2438 26,503
H&M Holdings 1751 24,535
Peoples Natural Gas 6472 22,101
Chesapeake 3319 17,732
Carnegie Natural Gas 1154 17,663

Figure 6. Top 10 companies in terms of agreement acres. See the complete list.

There was, however, a major omission in our search list. We did not include Olympus Energy, LLC, a company with 45 permitted unconventional wells in the eastern portions of the county, 24 of which have been drilled. However, we do have records for Huntley & Huntley, the previous incarnation of this company, as well as Bow & Arrow, a land company that arranged a number of Huntley & Huntley’s leases. As it happens, we do have 70 records that include Olympus from the search criteria that we did use, but this compares to 1,015 records for the various Olympus Energy records currently available at the Deeds Office website. We will certainly make sure to include Olympus in future analyses, but in the meantime, it is our hope that most of these parcels are already included under Huntley & Huntley or Bow & Arrow.

Data Scraping and Mapping Methods

As is the case with all of FracTracker’s projects, we feel it is important to be transparent about our methods. This page details how we obtained and made sense of oil and gas data presented on the interactive map. Many of the methods are based upon a previous iteration of the project completed in 2016 with the assistance of the software development company West Arete.

As stated in the disclaimer, FracTracker cannot provide any assurance that the information provided in this lease records database or the resulting maps is accurate, reliable, or up to date. In addition, the information in this lease records database and the resulting maps should not be considered an assessment of property rights, nor should anyone consider the content within this database and the resulting maps as legal advice. The methods we used and the information obtained was done to the best of our abilities as workers of maps and data.

Obtaining the Data

Preliminary Research

FracTracker’s Lease Mapping Project is not the first attempt to get a comprehensive view of oil and gas leasing activity in Allegheny County. A similar effort was made by the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center for Social & Urban Research (UCSUR) in 2010, but changes in the county’s data structure made updating this for several years. Much has changed since that original map was released, but UCSUR was an invaluable resource for the first iteration of this project in 2016, both in terms of comparing our results, but also by being willing to discuss experiences and challenges that they faced along the way. Several key operators would have been missed from the current effort if it weren’t for the work they had done. You can read more about the previous UCSUR research here.

The Scraping Process

To scrape the data, we used to create the interactive lease map, records were pulled from the Allegheny County’s Department of Real Estate Office website. We created an automation program that selected Office of Deeds from the search page, entered one of the “free search” terms into the Business/Last Name text field, selected both Grantor and Grantee related records, and set a date range beginning on 1/1/2000.

The “free search” term came from a list of names generated by FracTracker from a variety of sources. This information included oil and gas companies listed by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection as either having an oil and gas well or a permit for a well. The list also included names of known land agencies, pipeline companies, and other operators listed on industry sites such as this one.

The program then visited each entry in the Search Results Index. This process would yield a “Document Index” for that spelling of that operator, from which the program would then visit each search results page in the Document Index.

There are many spelling variations and occasional misspellings in the documents. For example, Range Resources may be listed as “Range Resources Appalachia L L C,” or “Range Resources Appalachia LLC,” etc. To account for these inconsistencies, we manually devised a list of free term variations that would match all of the relevant records for that operator, while trying to minimize false positives. Due to these variations, sometimes it was necessary to use multiple search terms to match all of the records for one operator. The automated program would then visit the Allegheny County website, perform the searches, and download the results into a Search Results Index.

Each record in the Document Index would have a link to a Document Page. To continue the process, we needed a Block/Lot number (the number associated with each unique parcel in the county) in order to place the document on a map. Some documents would have a Block/Lot number and others would not. The program visited all Marginal Reference Documents (other documents associated with that parcel besides the one being viewed), including multiple levels of Marginal Reference Documents, to search for documents that had the Block/Lot number.

For each page, we would download the source of the page to disk, as well as maintain a record of its original URL on the County’s website, and any Marginal Reference Documents to which it might link. We used a unique document identifier present in the URL (“Number”) to check if the program had already visited and downloaded any given document. This technique allowed us to avoid re-retrieving any previously seen documents.

Parsing the Data

After all of the Documents had been downloaded to disk, the content of each one was parsed for all of its relevant metadata. Such metadata included the document’s number, date, and type. The list of Block/Lot numbers was saved, as well as the list of grantees and grantors. Because a document can link to others through its Marginal Reference Documents section, after this section was parsed, any documents linked to in this section may have to be retrieved, downloaded to disk, and parsed themselves. Thus, obtaining data for a particular operator was an iterative process: perform a search, download the initial set of documents, parse them, download any linked documents, parse them, and repeat until no new documents were found. All Document data was included in the database, and because we retain all the source code on disk, additional metadata can be parsed in the future if necessary.

Standardizing Block/Lot numbers

To display the parcels spatially, we needed to match the documents we scraped against a GIS-oriented shapefile containing all of the parcels in Allegheny County. The Block/Lot number provides us the means to do this, but the formatting in the documents did not match that of the shapefile. A Block/Lot written in a document like “123A456” may be referenced on the County’s Real Estate as like “123-A-456” and referenced in a shape file using its full-form Parcel Identification Number (PIN) “0123A00456000000.”

Additionally, there was some ambiguity in the formatting of the Block/Lot encountered in our documents. For example, one document listed the block lot as “1839K247 1.” Block lots in this format can be interpreted in PIN format as either “1839K00247000100” or “1839K00247000001.” In this particular case the latter interpretation is correct, but other documents containing block lots in a similar format only matched the former. There is no way of knowing the correct formatting of this type of Block/Lot without explicitly checking the various potential candidates against the shapefile itself.

The shapefile for all parcels in Allegheny County contains over 230,000 parcels, a large number to check every document against. To overcome this size limitation we utilized python libraries to asynchronously parse all the PIN combinations in the shape file and select the correct one. Once the Block/Lot numbers were resolved into valid PINs, filtering and mapping the parcel shape file to only those parcels mentioned in our Documents was possible.

Importing Additional Parcel Information

Other parcel metadata is useful for exploring this data. Municipalities, school districts, zoning types, and market values all enrich the narrative. Because we were able to resolve our documents’ block lot numbers into PINs, joining this metadata to our database was possible. It did require reformatting the text to be suitable for display, but otherwise it was fairly painless. We obtained this additional metadata from the county.

Converting Variations to Canonical Names

Among the data extracted from the land record documents, there was a large variability in the terms used within them. As mentioned above, a particular operator such as Consol could be referred to in the documents variously as “CONSOL GAS CO,” “CONSOL PA COAL CO L L C,” and “CONSOLIDATION COAL CO.” We looked through the data to resolve these variations among all known operators to collapse them down to one common or “canonical” name. Both the “verbatim” search term and the canonical name are stored in our database. Likewise the document “type” exhibits large variability. We collapsed several of these terms into one for ease of searching. For example the document types “O & G,” “AMEND O & G,” and “LEASE” are all displayed as the canonical form “O&G Lease.” Both the verbatim document type and canonical are stored in our database. The canonical terms are mainly used for simplifying the user interface. However, when a particular parcel is clicked, the verbatim terms are presented to the user. See our Understanding Lease Records page for more information on this process.

Redacting Private Names

Although the land records documents are public, and available for viewing on the County website, we chose to redact the name of any party that was mentioned on one and only one document. As this information is public, those interested can access it on the land records site.

Eliminating Irrelevant Documents

While we saved every document obtained in our original searches to our database, only certain document types are appropriate for viewing in the context of oil and gas agreements. For example, affidavits and bankruptcy records are not especially relevant and are eliminated from the dataset used to construct the parcel histories seen on the interactive map.

Bringing Data into the Map

Export the Data Keyed to Block/Lot Number

The next step in the process was to export a CSV file where each row represents a single document. These rows are keyed against the normalized block lot numbers. This means that a single block lot number may have many rows referencing it: one row for each document that is attached to that block lot. This data includes document metadata such as grantees, grantors, the search term that generated that document, municipality, school district, and general zoning designation.

Join The Data with Block/Lot Shape File for Allegheny County

The shapefile contains a shape for every parcel in Allegheny County (approximately 230,000 shapes). We took our list of formatted block lot PIN numbers and joined it with our shapefile so that we only have shapes for parcels which we also have document data. This process resulted in approximately 33,000 shapes for Allegheny County.

We also joined each shape to our metadata, so that we can search and filter the displayed shapes based on various options. This is what allows the interactive map to do things like display only parcels that have an O&G Lease, or parcels in a particular school district.

Load Shape-Based Data into a Django Web Application

We then uploaded this shapefile to an AWS PostgreSQL Database so that it could display the shapes of Block/Lots for which we have document data on an interactive Leaflet map. The well layers are all point-based data (as opposed to block lots, which are represented as polygons). The source for this data set is the PA DEP. This data also resides in the same database with one row for each well site, and two columns that represent the point’s coordinates. Other columns describe the well type, etc.

Recognizing Limitations

We approached the data scraping, parsing, and mapping work with a conservative eye in order to avoid over-representing the scale of oil and gas activity in the region. That said, we also recognize a number of limitations in our methods.

First, we believe our methods were successful in eliminating the vast majority of irrelevant records, but we acknowledge that there is still a marginal level of noise in the data. For instance, some oil and gas drilling companies such as Peoples Gas are also public utilities. We did our best to narrow records in the system pertaining to public utilities down to those that were specifically related to oil and gas development. That said, we recognize that a few documents outside that scope may remain in the dataset.

Second, our intent with this project was to capture leasing activity primarily due to the recent wave of unconventional oil and gas development. For this reason we set our date range to begin at 1/1/2000. Looking at the map one finds a number of additional oil and gas wells without corresponding leases associated with the parcel. Many of these are conventional wells with leases signed prior to 1/1/2000.

Missed Records

Third, we recognized that there are parcels likely under some kind of oil and gas agreement that were not captured with our methods. Missing records are partly due to the County’s website providing no way of knowing all the naming variations of a particular operator, nor the sum of operators in their database. We were forced to manually construct our list of suspected operators based on our knowledge of the industry. Some search terms we simply missed.

Despite these known limitations, we feel confident that our methods were extremely efficient in capturing a significant portion of oil and gas agreement activity in the county given the tools and data at our disposal. Nevertheless, the Allegheny Lease Mapping Project is a reverse engineered system. If there is one takeaway from the project it is that public information on oil and gas leasing activity is far from accessible, but is trending in the right direction with some data being backfilled.

User Guide

This user guide is intended to help you navigate the various features found on our Allegheny Lease Mapping System. The interface we’ve developed offers a variety of functions that allow you to filter parcels shown on the map and see information for individual parcels. Other features include toggles for different basemaps, well permits, and drilled wells. Below we describe those features in more detail.

For more information on how we determined what data shows on the maps, see the Data Scraping & Mapping Methods page.

Toggling Features

A number of features can be used to help provide some context to these mapped oil and gas agreements. Four basemaps are available:

  1. “OpenStreetMap” is useful to get a general lay of the land
  2. Switching to “Satellite Imagery” provides a more accurate depiction of what’s currently in that location
  3. “Dark” mode tones down the brightness
  4. “Topo Map” is useful for getting an idea of what lies both up and down stream

The other toggling feature is layers. In addition to the default “parcels” map layer as well as your filtered parcel layer, which shows properties in the database associated with some kind of oil and gas transaction, other layers show conventional and unconventional wells in the county.

Filtering Results

The purpose of the Allegheny Lease Mapping Project was to obtain and map all parcels found in the county to have some kind of oil and gas related transaction. By default, all parcels in the project database are shown when the map is launched. However, there are many reasons why one would want to view a subset of these parcels. A number of filters are provided to narrow down what shows on the map: date range, record type, company, municipalities, school districts, and zoning.

Within each filter category users can select individual options. A “Check All” and “Uncheck All” button are available to make the process convenient. A few details on these filters:

First, filter by company is limited to those with a substantial number of parcels in the database (over 50). Remaining companies are grouped under the “other” option. It is important to note that this filter does not show which companies own property leases at the present moment (or at a given date). The company filter only selects records in the database where the “grantee” matches the selected companies within the selected date range.

Second, these filter windows do not function independent of one another. For instance, if you were to select only “Churchill” from the list of municipalities and only “City of Pittsburgh” from the list of school districts, no parcels will appear on the map. This is because no parcels exist in Churchill that are also in the City of Pittsburgh school district.

Once you have set up the filters accordingly, clicking the “Apply Filters” button redraws the map using a subset of data matching the filters.

Viewing Parcel Details

Each orange polygon on the map corresponds to a unique parcel of land. Darker orange shading denotes parcels with multiple oil and gas records in the database.

Clicking on a parcel populates the sidebar with the polygon’s information. This window contains all of the information that exists in our database for the particular parcel including:

  • Parcel ID (also known as a Block/Lot)
  • Book/Vol/Page
  • Municipality
  • School District
  • Zoning
  • Land Use (a zoning sub-category)
  • Lot Acreage
  • Its Assessed Fair Market Value

Also in this window is the history of transactions. This list contains all of the oil and gas related records we were able to obtain for the parcel. For more information on what these transactions mean, see the Understanding Oil & Gas Agreements page. Click on the date to reveal the grantor, grantee and link to each record to the original document on the Allegheny County’s Department of Real Estate Office website.

Viewing Wells 

Similar to the Parcel Details sidebar, clicking on a drilled well or permit brings up a window with more details including:

  • Well Name
  • API Number (a unique identifier used by the state)
  • Operator
  • Permit Date (the date of permit issue) or Drilled Date (also known as SPUD)
  • Well Type (gas or oil)
  • Configuration (vertical or horizontal well)
  • Unconventional (true or false)

We hope you have found this user guide helpful. If you feel like you are ready, explore the map. However, if after reviewing this user guide you still have questions about how to operate the Allegheny County Lease Map, just ask us: info@fractracker.org.



Glossary

ⓘ This section covers essential details about lease contracts, ownership transfers, right-of-way agreements, and Pennsylvania’s unique “split estate” laws.

Understanding Oil and Gas Leases

Oil and gas leases usually refer to a contract between a mineral rights owner and a drilling company that wishes to extract those minerals (such as oil, gas, or other hydrocarbons). Understanding the commitments of these contracts can be difficult in the absence of professional legal assistance. Most leases give drilling companies broad discretion to decide how chemicals and waste will be stored on the property, the ultimate locations of well heads, pipeline routes, and other determining factors that can dramatically affect a landowner’s quality of life. Leases also rarely describe the potential water pollution, air quality impacts, and other risks of extracting oil and gas from the landowner’s property.

The length of oil and gas lease agreements is about five years on average. Typically, if a parcel is not drilled after a certain period of time, then the contract expires. Some leases, however, allow for extensions without the grantor’s approval. In other cases, gas companies use “force majeure” to extend a lease indefinitely by arguing that they were unable to meet the terms of the agreement due to legal or regulatory technicalities beyond their control. Whether it be the case that a landowner does eventually see a well on their property, or that their lease continues beyond their intentions, signing a lease can lead to a long and complicated relationship with the oil and gas industry.

Besides the basic mineral rights contract, the record of ownership associated with a particular parcel can be much more complicated than a single transaction. For instance, mineral rights owners are more often than not approached by “landmen” that represent different consulting firms. One such prominent company in Allegheny County is Huntley & Huntley. Once a land agent (lessee) completes a lease with the mineral rights owner (lessor), the rights can be transferred or “assigned” to a drilling company such as Range Resources, Chesapeake, or EQT. These rights might be assigned yet again to another drilling company as corporations trade their assets over time. Leases can also be extended, terminated, and amended. Other records can denote a right of way, where a landowner agrees to allow a pipeline across their property. Pennsylvania also has what is known as “split estate” where the mineral rights to a property may have been sold decades before the present landowner purchased the property. In this case one might also find deeds documenting the transfer of the surface rights to the property from one person to another.

Legal Terminology

To simplify the many different record types for users of the Allegheny Lease Mapping Project, FracTracker has created six broad categories. Below are descriptions of the record types associated with each of these categories. Click on the example documents under each category to see examples of each record type. FracTracker would like to thank Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services for assisting us with these definitions.

FracTracker found numerous overlaps within different records upon closer inspection of documents. For instance, a “LEASE” record may end up being an O&G lease, whereas other “LEASE” records end up being amendments to an O&G lease. These overlaps lead us to conclude that some records have been incorrectly categorized over the years. To obtain records for a particular parcel, users can click on the link next to the record of interest on the interactive map. This will lead to the record’s page at the Allegheny County Department of Real Estate Office website. Note that some of these records can exceed 10 pages and the county charges a per-page fee.

We have supplied here but a few of the many thousands of documents available in the County’s system in order to provide context to the project. Given that these are all public records, albeit for a fee, we encourage users of the Allegheny Lease Mapping Project to visit the County’s website to become more acquainted with oil and gas records.

Glossary of Terms

O&G: oil & gas leases, or contracts, between the owner of minerals, typically called a “lessor,” and a corporation, typically known as the “lessee,” where the lessor gives the lessee the right to explore, drill, produce, and sometimes even store oil, gas and other minerals for a specified primary term, and as long thereafter as oil, gas, and minerals are produced in paying quantities. The lessor usually gets royalties in exchange for the right to produce oil, gas and other minerals. At times, only a memorandum of the lease is provided to give notice that a property has been leased, but the full terms of the lease have not been recorded.

Example #1 – O&G lease

Example #2 – memo of O&G lease

Example #3 – memo of non-development O&G lease


AMEND O&G: amendments or modifications to oil & gas leases to alter or add to the terms of an original oil & gas lease.

Example #1 – amendment to O&G lease to include gas at all depths


LEASE: amendments, or modifications, to leases of different kinds, such as water withdrawal leases, oil & gas leases, and may include lease extensions beyond their primary term.

Example #1 – lease amendment adding acreage

Example #2 – extension of lease

Example #3 – notice of lease extension

Example #4 – water withdrawal lease and easement


NOTICE EXTENSION LEASE: notices that record the payment of a certain amount of money (usually called “shut-in royalties”) to extend the primary term of an oil & gas lease. The primary term is typically the period of time that an oil & gas lease remains in effect even though oil & gas production in paying quantities, drilling or other operations have not been initiated. 8498918 (notice of extension of primary term of o&g lease); 8498928 (notice of extension of primary term of o&g lease); 8684272 (notice of extension of primary term of o&g lease)

Example #1 – notice of extension of primary term of o&g lease

Example #2 – notice of extension of primary term of o&g lease

RELEASE: releases of property rights and/or other legal rights that the owner would otherwise be entitled to under law.

Example #1 – pipeline row release

Example #2 – damage liability release & indemnification: surface property, livestock, wildlife


RELEASE LEASE: releases of oil & gas lease rights that a person would otherwise be entitled to under law.

Example #1 – release of O&G lease


RELEASE OIL & GAS LEASE: releases of oil & gas lease rights that a person would otherwise be entitled to under law.

Example #1 – release of O&G lease

Example #2 – release of O&G lease 


SURR O&G: instruments documenting the voluntary transfer of oil & gas lease rights by agreement, but without the presence of a sale of those rights.

Example #1 – surrender of full O&G lease

Example #2 – surrender of O&G lease


TERM O&G: instruments providing notice that an oil & gas lease has terminated, usually because the lease has terminated by its own terms or because potential property interest holders wish to clarify their understanding of the expiration of a lease.

Example #1 – termination of lease/interest in O&G interests


TERM LEASE: instruments providing notice that a lease has terminated, usually because the lease has terminated by its own terms or because potential property interest holders wish to clarify their understanding of the expiration of a lease.

Example #1 – termination of memo of lease

ASGMT O&G: instruments documenting the sale, transfer, or conveyance of all or, many times, a fraction of ownership interests and/or rights of an oil and gas lease.

Example #1 – assignment of 2/3 interest in O&G lease

Example #2 – assignment of O&G leases w/ reservation of percentage interest


ASGMT LEASE: instruments documenting the sale, transfer, or conveyance of all or, sometimes, a fraction of ownership interests and/or rights of a variety of leases.

Example #1 – lease assignment for sewer trunk line 

Example #2 – assignment of royalty rights

R OF W: documentation of the grant of a right to place a pipeline across a person’s property and maintain that pipeline.

Example #1 – pipeline right of way

Example #2 – pipeline right of way


AMEND RIGHT OF WAY: amendments, or modifications, to the original grant of a right of way.

Example #1 – amendment to pipeline right of way

Example #2 – amendment & ratification of right of way


ASGMT RIGHT OF WAY: assignment of rights to a right-of-way across someone’s property. Assignments of property rights are instruments that document the sale, transfer, or conveyance of some or all of ownership interests.

Example #1 – assignment of right to a gas measurement station

SURRENDER R OF W: instruments documenting the voluntary transfer of some or all right-of-way rights by agreement, but without the presence of a sale of those rights.

Example #1 – partial surrender of pipeline right of way


RELEASE R OF W: releases of right-of-way rights that a person would otherwise be entitled to under law.

Example #1 – release/quit claim of rights to pipeline right of way

Example #2 – release/quit claim of rights to pipeline right of way


TERM RIGHT OF WAY: instruments providing notice that a right-of-way agreement has terminated, usually because it has terminated by its own terms or because potential property interest holders wish to clarify their understanding of the expiration of a right-of-way.

Example #1 – release & termination of right to pipeline right of way

AGREEMENT: various types of agreements, lease extensions, and court orders that serve to alter or shift real property rights and/or obligations.

Example #1 – option agreement 

Example #2 – farm-out agreement/assignment 

Example #3 – court order related to interest in real estate 

Example #4 – notice of lease extension


ASGMT AGRT: both oil & gas lease and road and/or pipeline right-of-way assignments. Assignments of property rights are instruments that document the sale, transfer, or conveyance of some or all of ownership interests, which may include, among other rights and obligations, leases, royalties, or net profit interests.

Example #1 – O&G lease assignment


DEED: instruments documenting the transfer of title to a property from one person, the grantor, to another, the grantee.

Example #1 – sale of real property

Example #2 – indenture

Example #3 – deed

Example #4 – special warranty deed

Lease Map

This lease map provides records of 269,370 agreements with oil and gas companies over 33,923 parcels in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, totaling 152,642 acres, or about 32% of the county’s landmass.

History

This guide helps users navigate the Allegheny Lease Mapping System, with tools to filter map parcels, view parcel details, and toggle basemaps, well permits, and drilled wells.

Analysis

Discover insights from our data, including parcel distributions by municipality, school district, and zoning. Download the master file for a comprehensive view of all records.

Methods

Explore FracTracker’s data collection and mapping process, which details the methods used to obtain, scrape, and clean oil and gas data for public use.

User Guide

How to filter parcels shown on the map, see information for individual parcels, and toggle features for basemaps, well permits, and drilled wells.

Glossary

Simplify complex oil and gas agreements with this guide, which explains each record type and includes examples for clarity.

Acknowledgements

Developed (2016) by West Arete

Legal advice provided by Fair Shake

Funded by Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments