Drilled But Uncompleted Wells Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

One source publishes the number outright: the EIA Drilling Productivity Report. It is the only record in Datadory's oil & gas drilling slice - 21 primary datasets, 18 of them free - that ships a ready-made drilled-but-uncompleted count, broken out monthly for the Anadarko, Appalachia, Bakken, Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Niobrara and Permian regions alongside a rig-weighted national average.

Everything else in the pool supplies inputs rather than the tally. State regulators publish spud dates, permits and completions - the Railroad Commission of Texas ships completions and permit masters, Colorado's ECMC refreshes well points daily, and BSEE carries a status code on each of its 57,482 Outer Continental Shelf wells. A DUC estimate is what you get when you join those fields: wells drilled, minus wells completed.

The whole product weighs almost nothing - two Excel workbooks totalling roughly 190 KB plus about 15 PDF issues - yet it carries the longest structured DUC history available anywhere for free. dpr-data.xlsx holds eight sheets of about 212 monthly rows apiece, each series running from January 2007 through June 2024: rig counts, new-well production per rig, and regional production. A separate DUC workbook extends further back, starting December 2013.

The practical consequence shapes everything else on this page. If your model needs DUC levels after mid-2024, the published series cannot supply them; you either reconstruct the backlog from regulator files or buy a feed.

1. Start with permits. The Texas Railroad Commission publishes a monthly drilling permit master plus a nightly permit trailer carrying lat/long, refreshed weekly alongside its Full Wellbore extract. Permit dates give you the front of the pipeline.

1. Date the drilling. The same RRC bundle separates horizontal permit files and Full Wellbore segments covering every well ever permitted in Texas, in EBCDIC and ASCII fixed width, CSV, JSON, shapefile and dbase. The RRC states plainly that "the conversion of the data and choice of conversion tools is the responsibility of the user" - budget for an EBCDIC translation step before any spud-date column lands in pandas.

1. Separate completed from producing. The Colorado ECMC Data Portal serves a 124,387-well shapefile (15.8 MB zipped) covering wells from permitted locations onward, refreshed daily. Join it to the production CSVs - 657,012 rows for 2024 alone, with archives back to 1999 - and a well location with no production history is your completion-lag candidate set.

1. Repeat per basin, then handle offshore separately. North Dakota's NDIC Oil & Gas Division runs a 43,824-well ArcGIS FeatureServer with sample spud dates reaching the late 1920s, plus a current-day rig list and a 172 KB RigStatistics.xlsx. For the Gulf, the BSEE Well API lists 57,482 OCS well records with operator, status, field and spud-date filters, and its companion completion table adds 57,000-plus completion rows.

Yes, because the same free stack covers every stage of the drill-to-complete pipeline. Rig activity sets the inflow: EIA's rotary rig count reaches back to 1949, splits onshore versus offshore, and separates crude oil from natural gas targets from 1973, downloadable as XLS, HTML tables or a JSON API. Permits add the lead time between intent and spud. The DUC workbook then measures the accumulation, and dpr-data.xlsx's new-well production per rig sheets convert completions into first-month volumes.

A worked sequence looks like this: regress monthly completions against lagged rigs and permits per region, carry the residual as the change in DUC inventory, and sanity-check the level against the published series through June 2024 before extending it forward. One region validates cleanly against a single state file: Bakken is exactly what North Dakota's NDIC inventory covers, defined as the Williston Basin / Bakken play across its 43,824 wells.

Canada needs a different spine. There is no US-style DUC publication north of the border in this pool; instead the Alberta Energy Regulator's ST98 outlook publishes annual well-count actuals from 1999 plus a rolling ten-year drilling forecast to 2034 as free XLSX companion files, which makes it the closest thing to a forward-looking activity series in the slice.

To rank the whole pool rather than just the DUC-relevant slice, browse free oil-gas-drilling datasets, the oil-gas-drilling data hub, or the datasets ranked for investors and quants working on oil & gas drilling.