Drilling Permits Pending Approval (with latitudes and longitudes)
Applications the Commission has received but not yet approved, twice a day.
What this is
Permit applications in flight. Same fixed-width shape as the approved permit file, including coordinates, but every record is an application the Commission has not acted on yet.
Published twice a day, at 11:30 and 17:30, which makes it the earliest public signal there is that an operator intends to drill somewhere.
How it is laid out
The Railroad Commission publishes this as Fixed-width ASCII. Columns are byte ranges with no separators, described only in a scanned record layout. We mirror the Commission's file exactly as they published it, byte for byte. We have not decoded this one into a table yet, so reading it needs the right tooling.
What we add
See intent before approval — who is filing where, days or weeks before the permit shows up in the approved file.
Diff two consecutive pulls to watch applications move from pending to issued, and measure how long the Commission is taking to act.
- Mirrored so the file is here when the Commission's own link is not.
- Documented — what it is, where it came from, and when we last fetched it.
Worth knowing before you use it
A pending application is not a permit. Some are withdrawn, some are denied, and the same well can appear here more than once as an operator amends its filing.
Records vanish from this file the moment they are approved — nothing marks them as approved, they simply stop appearing. Each file is a complete snapshot …
The full page lists every trap in this dataset.