County and basin drilling permits, United States

Monthly counts of approved new-drill oil and gas permits for every county of Pennsylvania (67 counties, through 2026-08) and Texas (254 counties, through 2026-08), from 2010-01: 321 counties and 64,200 county-month values carrying 227,311 permits, in one column, new_drill_permits — regulator approvals of a permit to drill a new oil, gas, combined or coalbed-methane well (undetermined and unknown types included), counted once per permit in the calendar month of its first approval and attributed to the surface county. A zero is asserted only in a month whose completeness is proved; a month that is not proved is omitted rather than filled. Basin series are plain sums of whole member counties from a fixed county-to-basin crosswalk: Barnett Shale, Eagle Ford, Permian Basin (Texas counties). A basin whose member states are not all in this version is published only under an identifier naming the states it covers, or withheld; 6 basins are withheld in this version. Permit records issued by: Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (Pennsylvania); Railroad Commission of Texas (Texas). Updated weekly by this project. This version covers Texas and Pennsylvania. Other states may be added in later versions. Corrections. Figures later found to be wrong are recorded at https://www.pointerminerals.com/datasets/errata, which is maintained outside this record and covers every version. The files in this deposit are fixed at the moment it was deposited and are never edited; anything learned afterwards appears there.