Public oil and gas data is never live. Each source has its own filing deadline, processing time, and publication schedule, and the gap between what happened and what is visible ranges from a day to more than a year. Knowing the lag for each source is the difference between reading the data correctly and reading it wrong.
Source by source
| Source | What it carries | Petrora loads | Typical lag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drilling permits (daily files) | New and amended permits | Daily | Issued permits appear one to two days after issuance, longer over weekends |
| Wellbore (EWA) file | Current operator, well type, status dates | Weekly | Days to a few weeks behind transfers and status changes |
| P-5 organization report | Operator registry and status | Weekly | Days |
| Wellbore records (dbf900) | Completions, tops, casing, perforations | Weekly | Filed after completion; weeks to months after the work |
| Production (PDQ) | Lease oil and gas by month | Monthly | The last two to three months are incomplete and revised later |
| UIC permits | Disposal and injection permits | Monthly | Weeks |
| H-10 injection volumes | Monthly injected volumes | Monthly | About thirteen months |
| TexNet injection reporting | Daily volumes in Permian response areas | Daily | About five days; Permian only |
| Earthquakes | Located events | Daily | Hours to a day |
Permits: issued date versus first seen
The RRC's daily permit files publish permits a day or two after they are issued, and the gap widens around weekends and holidays. Petrora records when each permit first appeared in its own database and uses that, rather than the issued date, to order recent permits and to decide what is new. A permit issued on a Friday and published the following Tuesday shows a Friday issue date and a Tuesday first-seen date. Both are shown.
Production: reported through
Production for a given month becomes visible over the following two or three monthly dumps as operators file and the RRC processes the reports. The most recent month in any dump is always short. Petrora labels production with the month it is reported through and does not present the latest partial month as if it were complete. Cumulative figures use everything reported to date and will rise slightly in later months for the same period.
The rules Petrora follows
- No estimates shown as facts. No nowcasts, no extrapolation of partial months, no allocation of lease volumes to wells.
- Lag is labeled. Figures from lagging sources carry the period they are reported through.
- Fresh sources lead. Where a daily source exists, such as TexNet injection reporting, it is shown ahead of the annual one.
- Counts are as of load time. Headline counts on the data page are refreshed hourly from the database and dated.
The one deliberate approximation on the site is the count of monthly production records on the data page, which uses the database's own row estimate because the exact count is too slow to serve on every request. It is marked with a tilde.