How Competitive Intel Teams Use Oil & Gas Drilling Data

In software categories, competitive intel product teams diff pricing pages and app-store listings. In drilling, the equivalent primary record is a filing a rival cannot suppress: a drilling permit, a spud date, an active-rig row, a completion ledger. Regulators publish these by law, which makes the evidence chain auditable in a way vendor summaries never are.

It is a thin slice of the persona's whole map - of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs, 682 score relevance 2 or higher for competitive-intelligence and product teams, and 509 of those 682 are free. Drilling compensates with depth: weekly wellbore extracts, daily shapefile refreshes and rig lists published as public duty rather than product. Treat this page as the build-it-yourself alternative to a permit-alerting subscription.

Permits are the earliest public signal of intent: filed before a rig moves, attributed to a named operator, countable by county and month. OilPriceAPI Drilling Intelligence - Well Permits aggregates more than 2.19 million permit records from 27 state regulators into one REST API. Its North Dakota statistics page reported 41,899 historical permits spanning December 23, 1904 to August 17, 2026, with 69 permits in the latest 30-day window and an -18.2 percent year-over-year change.

Basin-scale deployments need rig-level rows, not indices. North Dakota's Active Drilling Rig List publishes one row per rig - rig name, operator, well, current location, start date and next location - refreshed current-day, alongside a RigStatistics.xlsx workbook of about 172 KB.

Completion backlog reads as forward supply. The EIA Drilling Productivity Report shipped monthly rig counts, new-well production per rig and drilled-but-uncompleted (DUC) wells for seven regions - Anadarko, Appalachia, Bakken, Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Niobrara and Permian - with the dpr-data.xlsx series running January 2007 through June 2024. The standalone report ended with the May 13, 2024 issue; the series continues in EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook tables, so a rising DUC count still tells you a competitor has capital committed but not yet producing.

Offshore, yes, to the individual borehole. The BSEE Well API grid held 57,482 Outer Continental Shelf well records at research time - 55,549 in the Gulf of America, 1,714 Pacific, 167 Alaska and 52 Atlantic - filterable by Company Name, Status Code, Field Name and Spud Date, with CSV and XLS export and a daily refresh stamp. The broader BSEE Data Center layers drilling permits (APD), platforms and OGOR production back to 1996 on top.

Onshore state registries are equally direct. Colorado's ECMC portal ships a 124,387-well shapefile (WELLS_SHP.ZIP, 15.8 MB, 37 attributes including operator, spud date and coordinates) refreshed daily with no restrictions beyond a disclaimer, plus per-year production CSVs reaching back to 1999 - 657,012 rows for 2024 alone. North Dakota's FeatureServer returns fileno, api_no, operator, spud_date, field_name, status and county for 43,824 Bakken wells on a live query.

For a century-scale installed-base map, the USGS Aggregated Well History release bins every US well from 1817 to September 2022 into 1-mile and 10-mile squares with counts by type - built from the proprietary IHS Markit database yet containing only aggregate counts, which makes it the one open, nationally consistent view of who drilled where and when. Wyoming's time-stamped shapefile adds roughly 203,000 wells with approximate start and stop drilling years spanning 1900 to 2020.

Watching rivals abroad starts with EMODnet Human Activities - Oil and Gas Wells, 28,506 offshore wells across 18 European countries carrying status, spud year, operator and drilling company, revised July 4, 2025 - and with the Global Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker (GOGET), Global Energy Monitor's asset-level tracker of roughly 7,673 field-level units across 95 countries with ownership, status and reserves under commercial delivery terms 4.0.

Treatment chemistry is disclosed per well, per job. The FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry held 249,495 disclosures since January 2011, with roughly 7.3 million ingredient-level rows in a free 440 MB CSV bundle refreshed five days a week. Each ingredient record names the claimant company behind trade-secret protection, so a rival's chemistry choices and supplier relationships are documentary rather than speculative.

In Appalachia, Pennsylvania DEP publishes about 20 interactive reports covering permits issued, SPUD data by county and operator, well inventory, inspections, violations and enforcement, plugging and waste, backed by bulk extract feeds and a 47-page data dictionary (version 1.8, April 7, 2022). Violation and enforcement counts per operator are among the few public proxies for how a competitor's operating discipline actually compares.

Upstream one industry, integrated oil & gas data for competitive intel product teams picks up where this pairing's thin relevance tagging leaves off - Norway's FactPages and peers expose rival drilling activity and ownership stakes in bulk. The oil-gas-drilling data hub indexes every dataset page, and all competitive-intel-product-teams resources place this industry in the persona's wider toolkit.