OilPriceAPI Drilling Intelligence - Well Permits

OilPriceAPI Drilling Intelligence - Well Permits is the physical-activity record in OilPriceAPI's three-dataset catalog, aggregating United States drilling-permit data from 27 configured state regulators into one normalized feed of more than 2.19 million historical records. Where a commodity-price feed says what hydrocarbons sold for, this one says who is lining up to drill: all-time permit totals per state, trailing 30-day and 365-day issuance, year-over-year change, and a ranked operator table carrying each company's permit count and market-share percentage.

The wider Drilling Intelligence bundle travels in the same envelope: weekly rig counts for the US, Canada and international markets, Permian, Eagle Ford and Bakken frac-spread differentials, monthly drilled-but-uncompleted (DUC) well analyses, and report feeds drawing on Baker Hughes, EIA and OPEC publications. Permitting leads rigs and rigs lead production, which is why activity desks read this record as the earliest of those three signals rather than the last.

Two properties make it usable at pipeline grade. First, normalization: identical fields return for any of the 27 states, so a multi-basin footprint is one integration instead of 27 portal dialects. Second, verification: Datadory marks the field definitions below as verified, checked against published documentation in the August 2026 research pass, with North Dakota confirmed directly as the reference state.

The verified North Dakota summary, exactly as it arrives:

# well permits - North Dakota, record as of 2026-08-17
state         : North Dakota   state_code     : ND
total_permits : 41,899         coverage_start : 1904-12-23
latest_record : 2026-08-17     last_30_days   : 69
last_365_days : 744            yoy_change     : -18.2%

Read what one row compresses. 41,899 permits spanning December 23, 1904 to August 17, 2026 is more than a century of state permitting history reduced to a single joinable summary. The activity window sits beside the stock: 69 permits issued in the latest 30 days against 744 across the trailing year, and the year-over-year change of -18.2% turns both into a trend statement - permitting is cooling in the state that anchors the Williston Basin.

Every other state lands in precisely this shape, keyed on state_code. One caveat stated plainly: North Dakota is the summary verified directly at research time, and the remaining 26 states inherit the structure rather than a second independent confirmation. Get a sample cut to the states you actually operate in and check their snapshots against whatever you already hold before wiring anything.

Ten fields make up the verified summary record, defined in the table below. Four carry the economics of the dataset - total_permits, last_30_days, last_365_days, year_over_year_change - and together they turn a static archive into an activity indicator: stock, momentum, and direction in one row.

The top_operators array is where competitive reads come from: each entry pairs an operator name with its permit count and percentage share of the ranking window, so concentration in a basin's permitting - who is locking up acreage and who has stepped back - is a sort operation rather than a research project.

The provenance group (data_as_of, source_checked_at, cadence) timestamps the newest underlying record and the state-source handling behind it. Those columns ride along on every delivery deliberately: they let your pipelines assert freshness thresholds themselves instead of trusting an unverified assumption about currency.

Geography - 27 US states with configured state-regulator sources, which spans essentially the whole American onshore drilling map: the Permian pair, the Williston, the Gulf Coast states, the Appalachian plays and the Mountain West. North Dakota was verified directly during research, with New Mexico and Colorado among the linked state pages; the definitive roster confirms with your sample.

Temporal - depth is a property of each state, because each regulator sets its own archive start. North Dakota runs from December 23, 1904 to August 17, 2026 as of the research date, giving 122 years of continuous permitting history; younger regulatory regimes start when their recording started. The feed preserves each state's true span rather than truncating everything to a common window.

Granularity - two levels serve different jobs. The aggregate summary - one row per state, with the ranked operator array beneath it - powers dashboards and screens. Row-level permit records sit underneath the aggregates for work that needs well-level resolution, and both levels normalize to the dictionary above so the switch between them is a filter, not a re-platforming.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You pick the channel and the cadence; neither is coupled to anything upstream. Take a one-time historical pull of a century of North Dakota permits, or keep a warehouse table current so each new 30-day window and each revised operator share diffs cleanly into yesterday's rows. Deliveries arrive typed and keyed on state_code, so a state summary joins to your own acreage, rig or production tables on one column instead of after a fuzzy-matching project.

Scope is a parameter, not a rebuild: a feed cut to two basins widens to all 27 states without reshaping anything, and the provenance columns survive the trip intact, which means your own freshness alerts fire off data_as_of rather than off hope. Sample first - name your states, check the snapshots, then set the cadence.

• Leading-indicator modeling - permit issuance precedes rig mobilization by weeks, so the 30-day windows and year-over-year changes function as an early signal for activity, service demand and equipment utilization (investors and quants use cases).
• Competitive tracking - the top_operators array with permit counts and percentage shares shows which companies are adding inventory and which have gone quiet, state by state (market researchers use cases).
• Multi-state consolidation - one normalized contract across 27 regulators replaces 27 portal dialects, EBCDIC layouts and shapefile projections, cutting weeks of maintenance out of a data stack (developers and builders use cases).
• Model features - aggregated permit counts and operator concentration feed directly into activity forecasts and basin-level supply models as engineered features (data scientists use cases).
• DUC and completion analysis - paired with the monthly DUC analyses in the same bundle, permitted-but-undrilled inventory becomes readable, separating true activity growth from backlog drawdown.

• Investors & Quant Researchers - the earliest quantitative signal in the drill-bit chain, with a century-long North Dakota history for backtesting (investors and quants use cases).
• Developers & Data-Product Builders - one schema, 27 states, provenance columns included - the shape a permitting dashboard or alerting product wants on day one (developers and builders use cases).
• Market Researchers & Consultants - defensible state-level permitting baselines and operator-share tables underneath market-sizing and entry work (market researchers use cases).
• Data Scientists & ML Engineers - stable-schema activity features with explicit timestamps, suitable as targets and regressors alike (data scientists use cases).
• Strategy and land teams at operators - read competitors' permitting tempo in the basins you hold acreage in, without building a state-by-state collection effort.

This record owns the normalized multi-state permitting layer. Its neighbours own single jurisdictions and adjacent altitudes. The Texas Railroad Commission oil and gas data sets go deeper inside the largest single state - weekly Full Wellbore files and a monthly drilling-permit master straight from the regulator. The NDIC Oil & Gas Division well and rig data serves the Williston Basin well-by-well from the very state whose permit summary anchors this feed's verified sample. The Colorado ECMC data portal covers another linked state at full regulatory depth, and the USGS aggregated drilling and production data adds a national produced-volumes perspective - we maintain a direct Texas RRC vs USGS comparison for teams weighing regulator depth against national breadth. The Sondio Data Platform is the nearest commercial peer, delivering wells and monthly production histories from 27 regulatory sources.

The honest trade: regulators give maximum depth in one jurisdiction for the cost of learning each one; this record gives uniformity across 27 for the cost of going through a commercial layer. Pick by whether your question is how deep in Texas or how wide across the country. The OilPriceAPI source profile covers the vendor's full catalog, and the best oil and gas drilling datasets ranking places it among the alternatives.