Data & methodology
Where the numbers come from
Everything on this site comes from two public bulk files published by the Railroad Commission of Texas: the drilling-permit master (daf802.txt) and the P-5 operator master (orf850.txt). Once a month we rebuild our whole database from those files, from scratch. Any number here can be looked up in the RRC's own query tools, and our statewide totals match the RRC's published monthly summaries.
| Source file | SHA-256 | Bytes | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|
| daf802.txt | 49868c74ff93d104b478bbb0989fab4dcc87982b27f5b71f2d901e51a12d755f |
1,392,082,216 | 13,479,934 |
| orf850.txt | 4d1e65655fdb37d65a8b79bdf3ae9a7300ca1ae6d921accdc91d7acad49e7b83 |
120,902,504 | 633,876 |
- build run:
b04639f1-4892-49f1-b39d-f21c6ab37ec7 - built (UTC): 2026-08-08T01:19:48+00:00
- county scope: all
- records: 950,665 permit filings · 993,336 application roots · 78,212 P-5 organizations
- quarantined source lines: 3478 · validation issues recorded: 3783
How permits are counted (proposed, still under review)
- What counts as one permit: one RRC permit number, counted once. Amendments don't add to the count. They show up as their own series instead, which is how the RRC reports them too.
- Which quarter a permit lands in: the quarter the RRC approved it. We checked this choice by re-computing the RRC's published May and June 2026 statewide tables from our data. We came within one record.
- Which permit types are included: New Drill, Reenter, Field Transfer, Recompletion, and Reclass. Totals include all of them, so they line up with the RRC's headline number.
- Who a permit belongs to: the legal operator by P-5 number. We never merge companies just because their names look alike, and status letters are shown exactly as the RRC reports them.
- Zeros and small numbers: a change from zero shows as "n/a" rather than some huge percentage, and when the starting count is small we say so, because +200% might mean two permits.
The full rules and the evidence behind them are in the project repository: methodology.md (currently proposed, awaiting sign-off) and validation-log.md, which records our spot checks against the RRC's query tools.
Who builds this
EnSignals is built by Andrew Fetsch, an Energy Commerce major (with a second major in Supply Chain Management) at Texas Tech University. The idea behind the project is simple: energy data you can actually verify. Every number on the site can be traced back to a public RRC filing, and the counting rules were tested against the RRC's own published statistics before anything went on a page.