Powder River Basin
The Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana is known for both oil production and coal mining.
EIA does not publish a current Powder River production series. Wyoming totals are intentionally not used as a basin proxy.
We leave the measurement absent instead of substituting a broader geography or an estimated zero. The basin geography, geology, operators, formations and related-basin references below remain available.
Understanding Powder River Basin
The Powder River Basin spans northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana. It is widely known for thick coal deposits, but its petroleum section also includes Cretaceous targets such as the Turner, Parkman, Frontier, Mowry and Niobrara. Those intervals differ in depth, pressure and fluid character, so a Powder River well should be evaluated by formation and location rather than by a single basin archetype.
Oil development is concentrated in particular Wyoming fairways and does not track statewide output one-for-one. EIA does not currently publish a Powder River-specific production series in the STEO dataset used here. This page therefore avoids presenting Wyoming production or U.S. rig counts as basin facts while retaining the formations, geography and operator context needed to interpret permit records.