GRID · OIL & GAS FIELDS
Where the World’s Hydrocarbons Come From
Every refinery, pipeline and gas-fired power plant on this canvas starts in the same place: a field where oil or gas is pulled out of the ground. This layer maps the world’s 444 notable oil and gas fields as oil-derrick marks coloured by what they produce — oil, gas, or both— the very start of the energy chain that ends at your light switch. The giants are all here: Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, the largest oil field ever found; Burgan in Kuwait; Rumaila in Iraq; Daqing in China; Cantarell in Mexico; Prudhoe Bay in Alaska; and the North Sea names — Ekofisk, Brent, Troll. One honest note up front: Wikidata has bulk-imported thousands of tiny US fields, so the raw set is about four-fifths American — a distortion of where the world’s oil actually is — so this map shows the notablefields (those covered by at least two Wikipedia languages), which restores the real global picture. Wikidata carries no reserves or production figure, so the derricks aren’t sized — type is the colour. Tap a derrick for its name, type and country.
Oil, gas, and the fields that hold both
Most named fields are oil fields, but pure gasfields are a distinct world — the North Sea’s Norwegian gas (Troll, Sleipner, Ormen Lange), Qatar’s vast North Field, the Russian Arctic — and a good number of the largest fields yield both, which is why so many of the North Sea giants carry the blended mark. The split comes straight from each field’s Wikidata classification.
Where the fields are
With the import noise removed, the ranking reads like the real map of world hydrocarbons: the United States still leads on field count (a great many distinct fields, if smaller than the supergiants), then Russia, the North Sea powers (the UK and Norway), and the Gulf— Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia — whose few fields are the largest on Earth. (Counts are of notable named fields, not barrels in the ground — the Gulf holds far more oil in far fewer fields.)
A note on the map you’re looking at
This is the clearest example on the canvas of why notabilitybeats a raw dump. Wikidata holds well over six thousand fields with coordinates, but roughly four-fifths are small United States fields imported in bulk, each with a single Wikipedia entry — left in, they’d bury the world’s oil under a cloud of Texan dots. Cutting to fields covered by at least two languages drops that import noise and leaves 444genuinely notable fields, spread the way the world’s oil and gas actually are. Read the regional counts as the shape of the notable field world, not a reserves league table.
About this data
Every field comes from Wikidata (items that are an instance or subclass of “oil field”, “natural gas field” or “oil-and-gas field” with coordinates, CC0). The type is derived from those classifications: a field listed under both oil and gas (or under the explicit oil-and-gas class) is shown as both. We cut the set to fields with at least two Wikipedia sitelinks because the raw class is roughly 81% United States — a bulk import of small fields that would misrepresent world oil geography — and the cut rebalances it to the real distribution (the US around 15%, then Russia, the North Sea, the Middle East and the Caspian). There is no reserves or production figureon Wikidata for these, so — as with the LNG, refinery and desalination layers — this map does not invent a size hierarchy: every derrick is the same size and the well-defined type is the colour, with density handled by showing the world-famous fields first and the rest on zoom. Operators are never shown. Snapshot taken 2026-06-27.