Where this data comes from

Everything on this map is official public record. Nothing is estimated, scraped from a broker, or bought from a data vendor. This page explains how current it is, how we check it before you see it, and — the part most sites skip — what it can't tell you.

The source

Every operator who wants to drill a well in Texas has to file a drilling permit with the state, and those filings are public record. We pull from every public source available to us and combine them into one map.

It is the same record a landman reads. The difference is that we read it every night, for all 254 counties, and put it on a map instead of charging you for a lookup.

How often it updates

Every evening. New filings are on the map the same night they become public — we don't add a delay, and there's no paid tier that sees them sooner. A monthly summary goes out on the first of each month to anyone subscribed to a county.

How it is checked

Nothing goes on the map unvalidated. Every night's data is run through a battery of automated checks — that the records are complete and internally consistent, that the dates are real dates, that the locations land where they should, and that nothing has gone missing since the last update.

If the checks don't pass, nothing is published. The previous day's data stays on the map and we are alerted the same evening. We would rather show you yesterday's record, correctly, than today's record, mangled. Every original file is kept exactly as we received it, so any number on this site can be traced back to the government record it came from.

Why some pins are hollow

This is the honest part, and it's the thing to understand before you read anything into a pin's position.

• Solid pins are exact. A real surveyed location was published for that permit, and the pin sits where the well is going.
• Hollow pins are approximate. No location was published for that permit yet, so we place it at the center of its county, nudged slightly off its neighbours so you can tap it. The county is right. The spot is not. A hollow pin is not near the place it appears to be near.

How completely locations are published varies from night to night, so where one source leaves a permit unplaced we resolve it against the others before the map is built. The result is that every permit currently on this map has a real location and there are no hollow pins at the moment. That can change the next time a permit appears that no public source has placed yet, which is why the hollow pin still exists and is still explained here.

When a real location does arrive later, the pin becomes solid on the next nightly refresh automatically — nothing on our end has to be corrected, because we never wrote the approximate location down as though it were real.

One consequence worth stating plainly: hollow pins never count toward distance. When you drop a pin on your acreage and we tell you how many permits are within 10 miles, that count uses exact coordinates only. Including county-center guesses would let us report a bigger, more exciting number that happens to be made up.

What this data is not

A drilling permit is an operator telling the state they intend to drill. It is a strong signal about your area, and it is not a complete picture of it. The permit record does not contain:

• Ownership. Nothing here says who owns the minerals under any tract, including yours.
• Lease terms. Whether acreage is leased, to whom, and on what royalty is not in the permit record.
• Production or revenue. Permits are filings, not barrels. A permitted well may never be drilled.
• Prices paid. What minerals actually sold for nearby is not public record in Texas the way a home sale is.

About the estimates

Question this page didn't answer? The questions page covers what permits mean, what to do about an offer letter, and the vocabulary — or ask us there directly and a real person answers.