Oil-Gas-Drilling Data Guide Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

US state regulators publish the deepest well-level records: the Texas Railroad Commission ships weekly Full Wellbore files in EBCDIC and ASCII covering every well ever permitted in the state, Colorado's ECMC refreshes a 124,387-well shapefile and per-year production CSVs daily, and North Dakota's Oil & Gas Division serves 43,824 Bakken wells over a live ArcGIS FeatureServer. Federal sources add the offshore and national views: BSEE covers 57,482 Outer Continental Shelf wells, USGS aggregates every US well back to 1817 into 1-mile grid squares, and EIA publishes rotary rig counts from 1949 plus the Drilling Productivity Report for seven shale regions.

The 21 primary records sort into four working groups: state well and permit registries, federal offshore and national aggregates, activity and productivity time series, and specialized chemical, machine-learning and commercial sources.

State well and permit registries

Federal offshore and national aggregates

• BSEE Well API (multiregional online query) (quality 9). The only free, daily-refreshed registry of all 57,482 US offshore wells - 55,549 in the Gulf of America, 1,714 Pacific, 167 Alaska, 52 Atlantic - with CSV/XLS export and a 2.6 MB raw zip (mv_api_list_all.txt runs 9.3 MB). Spud dates reach the early 1950s, with earliest completions in the file from 1966.
• BSEE Data Center (quality 9). The broader federal portal: hundreds of free products spanning drilling permits (APD), OGOR production since 1996, platforms, pipelines and roughly 55 GIS layer archives, commercial delivery terms with a requested byline.
• USGS Aggregated Oil and Natural Gas Drilling and Production History of the United States (quality 9). A public-domain release aggregating every US well from 1817 to 2022 into 1-mile and 10-mile grid squares with annual oil, gas and water production - two archives totalling about 607 MB compressed. Caveat: over 300,000 production records of unspecified year were assigned to the year before first known production, creating artificial spikes in some first years.
• EMODnet Human Activities - Oil and Gas Wells (quality 8). 28,506 offshore well points across 18 European countries with status, spud year and operator attributes, commercial delivery terms 4.0, delivered as shapefile, FileGDB, GeoJSON, WMS or WFS; last revised July 4, 2025.
• GOGI - Global Oil & Gas Infrastructure Features Database (quality 8). NETL and EDF's open inventory of 4.8+ million infrastructure features from 380+ source datasets - wells, pipelines, platforms, refineries - as a 166 MB geodatabase ZIP.

Activity and productivity time series

Specialized, ML and commercial sources

Six related records extend the pool for adjacent workflows - Equinor's Volve open field dataset, two Kaggle well-production sets, the NSTA National Data Repository, the Global Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker and NSTA UKCS open data.

Ten recurring jobs define how teams work this pool, and each maps to named sources:

Market Researchers & Consultants. They search "alberta drilling activity forecast data" and "historical rig count data excel" to size markets and build decks. The AER's ST98 supplies the ten-year well-activity forecast to 2034, EIA's rotary series gives a 1949-2025 US baseline as XLS, and Malaysia's DOSM OGSE census sizes a 2,894-establishment, RM79.2 billion gross-output sector. Catalog-wide, 786 datasets rate as strongly relevant for this persona and 665 of those (84.6%) are completely free - a share this slice beats at 18 of 21. The market researchers hub carries the sourcing guidance.

Journalists, Academics & Students. Regulator sources are citation-safe by construction: BSEE content is US federal public information, USGS releases are commercial delivery terms with access and use constraints listed as none, and FracFocus permits aggregation with attribution-style terms. Searches like "gulf of mexico spud dates" resolve straight to BSEE's 57,482-well query without an account.

A working stack runs five layers, cheapest and most durable first:

The figures below are drawn from Datadory's catalog records and the industry slice, as of August 2026.

The EIA Drilling Productivity Report. Its dpr-data.xlsx workbook holds eight sheets of about 212 monthly rows each from January 2007, covering rig counts, new-well production per rig and drilled-but-uncompleted wells for seven regions: Anadarko, Appalachia, Bakken, Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Niobrara and Permian. How do I get Texas Railroad Commission well and permit data?

BSEE's Well API query lists 57,482 Outer Continental Shelf well records, including 55,549 in the Gulf of America, with operator, status, field and spud-date filters plus CSV and XLS export. The broader BSEE Data Center adds drilling permits (APD), platforms, pipelines and OGOR production from 1996, all free and refreshed daily. Is there an API for oil and gas drilling permit data?

DataDRILL on Zenodo provides two commercial delivery terms 4.0 CSVs of 2,337 and 2,774 samples with 28 real-time drilling variables each, built for formation pressure prediction and kick detection. For geoscience model evaluation, the FormationEval benchmark packages 1,632 exam-style JSON items spanning petrophysics and drilling domains with a public leaderboard.

These pages continue the thread: