Gulf of America Offshore Drilling Permits & Rig Monitor (BSEE)

Track every offshore drilling permit in the Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico) from the official BSEE data center, with the rig, water depth, block, coordinates, and the live status of the well. Turn on monitor mode and schedule it to get only new permits, permit revisions, rig moves, spuds, and wells that reached total depth since your last run.

What does it do?

This Actor downloads two public files that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) refreshes every morning: the Application for Permit to Drill (APD) file and the borehole file. It keeps the Gulf of America permits, joins each one to its borehole by API number, and returns one clean record per permit with the operator, permit type, rig name and type, water depth, surface and bottom-hole area, block, and lease, coordinates, spud date, total depth, and current borehole status.

It reads the same bulk files BSEE offers for download, so there is no browser, no proxy, and no login involved. About 20,000 Gulf permits are available, from 1990s wells to permits approved this week.

Who is it for?

• Offshore service, equipment, and supply-boat sales teams who want to know which rig is going where next.
• Rig brokers and drilling contractors who follow competitor rig activity and operator programs.
• Energy analysts and investors who track deepwater drilling by operator, area, and water depth.
• Anyone who would otherwise download BSEE zip files and join them in a spreadsheet by hand.

Input

Field	Type	Description
operatorContains	text	Case-insensitive text that must appear in the operator name, for example shell or chevron. Up to 80 characters.
areaCodes	list of codes	Two-letter BSEE area codes matched against the surface or bottom-hole area, for example GC Green Canyon, MC Mississippi Canyon, WR Walker Ridge, or KC Keathley Canyon. Empty means the whole Gulf.
approvedSince	date	Earliest date BSEE approved the permit, YYYY-MM-DD.
approvedUntil	date	Latest date BSEE approved the permit, YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive.
minWaterDepthFt	number	Only permits in at least this much water, for example 5000 for deepwater. Up to 15,000.
boreholeStatuses	list of statuses	Only permits whose borehole currently has one of these BSEE statuses, for example DRL (drilling active) or COM (completed). Empty means any status, including permits whose well has not been started.
maxResults	number	Most matching permits to check in one run, newest approval first. Default 1000, maximum 50,000.
onlyNewOrChanged	true or false	Monitor mode. Outputs only permits that are new or changed since the previous run of the same search.

Permits come newest approval first. BSEE files every revision of a permit as its own permit, so one well can appear several times, once per revision.

Sample input, for every well BSEE lists as drilling right now:

{
  "boreholeStatuses": ["DRL"]
}

Output

Each permit is one dataset item. This is a real record from a run on October 25, 2026:

{
  "permitId": -28242,
  "apiWellNumber": "608174049403",
  "apiNumberFormatted": "60-817-40494-03",
  "wellName": "A023",
  "sidetrackNumber": "03",
  "bypassNumber": "00",
  "operator": "Shell Offshore Inc.",
  "operatorNumber": "00689",
  "permitType": "Revised Sidetrack",
  "wellTypeCode": "D",
  "wellType": "Development",
  "waterDepthFt": 2945,
  "requestedSpudDate": "2026-08-03",
  "submittedAt": "2026-10-21T09:17:33",
  "approvedAt": "2026-10-21T11:28:24",
  "surfaceArea": "MC",
  "surfaceBlock": "807",
  "surfaceLease": "G07963",
  "bottomArea": "MC",
  "bottomBlock": "807",
  "bottomLease": "G07963",
  "latitude": 28.16944694,
  "longitude": -89.22300048,
  "rigName": "H&P 201",
  "rigType": "PLATFORM",
  "rigId": 94113,
  "rigFunction": "Drilling",
  "subseaBop": false,
  "boreholeStatusCode": "DRL",
  "boreholeStatus": "Drilling active",
  "boreholeStatusDate": "2026-08-05",
  "spudDate": "2026-08-05",
  "totalDepthDate": null,
  "totalMeasuredDepthFt": null,
  "trueVerticalDepthFt": null,
  "changeType": "notTracked"
}

The sample search above returned 74 permits for 16 wells on 12 rigs, from BP, Shell, LLOG, Eni, Cantium, and Anadarko. You can download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML, or read them through the Apify API.

• permitId is BSEE's APD serial number. Permits filed through eWell carry negative serial numbers, which is how BSEE stores them.
• apiNumberFormatted splits the 12-digit API well number into state or area, block, well, and sidetrack parts. apiWellNumber keeps the raw digits for joining with other BSEE data.
• approvedAt is when BSEE approved the permit, which BSEE's own APD search calls the approved date. submittedAt is when BSEE received the application. Both are BSEE's Central-time timestamps, published without a time zone.
• boreholeStatusCode is BSEE's code and boreholeStatus is its plain-English label. The borehole fields are null when BSEE has no borehole for the permit yet.
• changeType is new or changed in monitor mode and notTracked otherwise.
• A value the source stores in an unusable form comes through as null instead of stopping the run.

Monitor mode

Set onlyNewOrChanged to true and add a schedule, for example every weekday at 7 AM Central. The Actor remembers each permit's approval time, rig, borehole status and status date, spud date, and total depth date for that exact search in a named key-value store. The first run outputs every matching permit as new. Later runs output only new permits and permits that moved, such as a permit that was revised, a rig that was swapped, a well that was spudded, or a well that reached total depth. Unchanged permits are skipped and you are not charged for them.

A few things are worth knowing before you rely on it:

• History is keyed on the operator text, area codes, approval dates, minimum water depth, and borehole statuses of the search. Area order and letter case do not matter, and neither does maxResults. If you change any of the filters, including a "since" date that you move forward each week, the Actor starts a fresh history and reports every matching permit as new again. Keep the filters fixed for a monitor.
• Each run only checks the newest maxResults permits of the search. A well that spuds or reaches total depth on an older permit is only caught if that permit is inside the window, so set maxResults to 50,000 to watch every permit. You still pay only for permits that changed.
• A borehole status filter such as DRL drops a well from the search once it stops drilling. To hear when wells finish, monitor without a status filter and read boreholeStatus in the output.
• Two schedules running the same search at the same time share one history, and the run that finishes last wins.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing.

• Permit record: $5.00 per 1,000 permits delivered to your dataset ($0.005 each).
• Actor start: Apify's standard start event.
• There is no separate charge per dataset item.

A daily monitor of the deepwater areas usually delivers a handful of permits a day, so it costs well under a dollar a month. A full pull of every Gulf permit, about 20,000 records, costs about $100. The first run of a monitor delivers every matching permit, so it costs the same as a plain run of that search. You can cap any run with Apify's maximum charge setting. The Actor stops cleanly when your limit is reached, and you are only charged for permits that actually reach your dataset.

Data source and freshness

Data comes from the BSEE Data Center raw data files for APDs and boreholes, published by the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement at data.bsee.gov. BSEE regenerates both files daily, usually early in the morning Central time, so a run sees permits approved up to the previous business day.

BSEE describes the data center as a working database that may contain errors. Some boreholes keep an old status for years. For example, a 2010 Macondo sidetrack in Mississippi Canyon 252, drilled by the Deepwater Horizon, is still listed as drilling. Check boreholeStatusDate and spudDate before you treat a DRL status as current.

If BSEE is down, slow, or returns something that is not the expected file, the run retries with backoff and then fails with a short message, keeping every permit it already delivered. Run it again later.

Is it legal to use this data?

The Actor reads public records that BSEE publishes for anyone to download. BSEE states that the information on its site is public and may be distributed or copied, asks for credit, and recommends getting the data straight from a BSEE server, which is what this Actor does on every run. Source: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), data.bsee.gov. The data is provided as is, without any guarantee that it is complete or current, and it is not a legal document or navigation data. Confirm anything important against the official BSEE records. See BSEE's site disclaimer and data center disclaimer. This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by BSEE or the U.S. government.

FAQ

Do I need a BSEE account or API key? No. The Actor downloads the same public files that BSEE offers on its data center pages.

Why does the same well show up several times? BSEE files each permit revision, such as a new rig or a revised sidetrack, as its own permit. Each revision is one record, so you can see the history of a well's permits.

How do I find area codes? Use the two-letter BSEE codes, for example GC Green Canyon, MC Mississippi Canyon, WR Walker Ridge, KC Keathley Canyon, AT Atwater Valley, GB Garden Banks, or AC Alaminos Canyon. Shelf areas such as ST South Timbalier and EI Eugene Island work the same way.

Does it include Pacific or Alaska permits? No. The Actor keeps only Gulf of America permits.