Proof of concept. This is an unofficial demo built by Datopian from the North Sea Transition Authority's public data. The official portal is NSTA Open Data. Questions or feedback: hello@datopian.com

UK England onshore petroleum unlicensed blocks

UKCS onshore petroleum unlicensed blocks in WGS84 (EPSG: 4326) A Licence is a geographically defined area for prospecting, exploration or extraction of petroleum resources. The North Sea Transition Authority's licensing system covers oil and gas within Great Britain, its territorial sea and on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS). The Petroleum Act 1998 vests all rights to the nation's petroleum resources in the Crown, but the NSTA can grant licences that confer exclusive rights to 'search and bore for and get' petroleum. Licences fall into several categories. The principal distinctions are between onshore and offshore licences, and between exploration licences (which cover exploration alone) and production licences (which cover both exploration and production). The NSTA has discretion in the granting of licences to help maximise the economic recovery of the UK's oil and gas resources. Licence data is represented by 3 different datasets; Licence. Licence polygons represent the whole licence and have one polygon per licence. Licence Blocks. Licenced Blocks and Sub areas represent finer divisions of these licences and may have many polygons per licence. Sub Areas. Most Licenced Blocks are split with several sub areas, sometimes with differing operators and beneficiaries.

Records
3,116
Formats
5
Last updated
5 Nov 2026

Download & API

UK England onshore petroleum unlicensed blocks (CSV)csv
Spreadsheet — attributes, with coordinates for point layers
Download
UK England onshore petroleum unlicensed blocks (GeoJSON)geojson
GeoJSON — for web maps and GIS tools
Download
UK England onshore petroleum unlicensed blocks (GeoParquet)geoparquet
Columnar — query with DuckDB / SQL
Download
UK England onshore petroleum unlicensed blocks (map tiles)pmtiles
Vector tiles — embed in a map
Download
Live ArcGIS layer (source)arcgis
Download

Rendered from PMTiles, queried in-browser from GeoParquet — no server. How this works

Schema

FieldTypeValues
Quadrant no.
QUADNO
string
Block no.
BLOCKNO
string
Block suffix
BLOCKSUFFI
string7 values: a (53), b (42), c (21)…
Block reference
BLOCKREF
string
Location
LOCATION
string1 values: ONSHORE (3,116)
Original datum
ORIGIDATUM
string1 values: OSGB NATIONAL GRID (3,116)