Petroleum County well depths

What these numbers mean if you are buying here

A county median is a useful orientation, not a prediction for a specific property. Well depth in Montana is driven by local geology and topographic position, and both change over short distances — particularly at the edges of the intermontane basins, where unconsolidated basin fill gives way to bedrock. Two parcels a mile apart in Petroleum County can require very different wells.

The spread here shows that directly. While the median is 150 feet, recorded depths run from 6 to 2,000 feet. That range is why our property reports select comparable wells around the specific parcel and weight them by geology rather than quoting a county average.

The median reported yield in Petroleum County is 10 GPM. Bear in mind these are short drilling-test measurements taken at completion, not sustained-capacity tests, so treat them as an indication of what drillers encountered rather than a guarantee of long-term supply.

Static water level — the depth at which water stands before pumping — has a median of 40 feet across 303 records in the county. This affects pump setting and operating cost.

We have indexed 2,663 water-right records associated with Petroleum County from Montana DNRC. Whether any of them attach to a particular parcel is a property-specific question — Montana publishes no authoritative parcel-to-water-right link, which is why our reports label these as potential associations and link you to the original DNRC abstract.