Louisiana Oil & Gas Wells & Drilling Permits (SONRIS)

Search every oil and gas well in Louisiana's official SONRIS database by parish, operator, and permit date. Turn on monitor mode and schedule it to get only new drilling permits and wells whose status, spud date, or completion date changed since your last run.

What does it do?

This Actor queries the public Office of Conservation well layer that the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources publishes through SONRIS GIS. It returns one clean record per well with the API number, operator, parish, field, status, permit, spud, and completion dates, depths, coordinates, legal location, and direct links to the SONRIS well profile and scanned documents.

It reads the official public ArcGIS endpoint, so there is no browser, no proxy, and no login involved. About 247,000 wells are available, from historic wells to permits issued this month.

Who is it for?

• Oilfield service and equipment sales teams who want fresh permit leads every morning.
• Landmen, mineral and royalty buyers, and title researchers who track activity near specific tracts.
• Analysts who follow operator activity in the Haynesville, Austin Chalk, and Gulf Coast plays.
• Anyone who would otherwise copy rows out of SONRIS by hand.

Input

Field	Type	Description
parishes	list of parishes	Pick from the 64 Louisiana parishes, spelled as SONRIS spells them, for example DE SOTO, CADDO, or ST MARY. Empty means every parish.
operatorContains	text	Case-insensitive text that must appear in the operator name. Letters, digits, spaces, and & . , ' ( ) / -, up to 80 characters.
permittedSince	date	Earliest permit date, YYYY-MM-DD.
permittedUntil	date	Latest permit date, YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive.
maxResults	number	Most wells to read in one run. Default 1000, maximum 250,000.
onlyNewOrChanged	true or false	Monitor mode. Outputs only wells that are new or changed since the previous run of the same search.

Wells come newest permit first. Wells with no permit date on file come last, newest serial number first.

Sample input:

{
  "parishes": ["CADDO", "DE SOTO"],
  "permittedSince": "2026-09-01"
}

Output

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

{
  "wellSerialNumber": 255875,
  "apiNumber": "17-031-27654-00-00",
  "apiNumber14": "17031276540000",
  "wellName": "HA RA SUD;PETRO-HUNT 13-12HC",
  "wellNumber": "005-ALT",
  "operator": "WNR HAYNESVILLE OPERATING, LLC",
  "parish": "DE SOTO",
  "field": "SPIDER",
  "status": "PERMITTED",
  "statusCode": "01",
  "permitDate": "2026-10-13",
  "spudDate": null,
  "completionDate": null,
  "measuredDepthFt": 23469,
  "trueVerticalDepthFt": 12777.0,
  "latitude": 31.933371034,
  "longitude": -93.759964344,
  "coordinatesInLouisiana": true,
  "section": "013",
  "township": "11N",
  "range": "14W",
  "wellProfileUrl": "https://sonlite.dnr.state.la.us/ords/apex/r/sonris_pub/sonris_data_portal/well-profile?clear=CR,9000&ig[ig_master]_well_serial_num=255875",
  "documentsUrl": "https://sonlite.dnr.state.la.us/ords/r/sonris/ucmsearch/finddocuments?qtype=eq&idx=xwellserialnumber&val=255875",
  "sourceUpdatedAt": "2026-10-24T09:05:26+00:00",
  "changeType": "notTracked"
}

The sample search above returned 21 permits in Caddo and De Soto parishes from BPX Operating, EXCO Operating, JERA Upstream America, Expand Operating, WNR Haynesville Operating, and one other operator. You can download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML, or read them through the Apify API.

• apiNumber is the 14-digit API number split into state, county, well, sidetrack, and event parts. apiNumber14 keeps the raw digits for joining with other data.
• changeType is new or changed in monitor mode and notTracked otherwise.
• Dates are calendar days in Louisiana time. A value the source stores in an unusable form comes through as null instead of stopping the run.
• coordinatesInLouisiana is true or false when coordinates are present and null when they are missing.

Monitor mode

Set onlyNewOrChanged to true and add a schedule, for example every weekday at 7 AM. The Actor remembers each well's status, status code, spud date, and completion date for that exact search in a named key-value store. The first run outputs every matching well as new. Later runs output only new permits and wells that moved, such as a permit that was spudded or a well that was completed. Unchanged wells 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 parishes, operator text, and permit dates of the search. Parish order and letter case do not matter, and neither does maxResults. If you change any of those three, including a "since" date that you move forward each week, the Actor starts a fresh history and reports every matching well as new again. Keep the dates fixed for a monitor.
• Each run only scans the newest maxResults wells of the search, so set it high enough to cover every well you want watched.
• An operator transfer on its own does not count as a change.
• A well that drops out of the search, for example after an operator transfer takes it outside your operator text or the state removes the row, is not reported. Compare datasets between runs if you need to see removals.
• If the saved history record is ever unreadable, the run fails without charging rather than reporting every well as new again. Delete that record from the louisiana-oil-gas-wells-monitor store to start over.
• 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.

• Well record: $5.00 per 1,000 wells delivered to your dataset ($0.005 each).
• Actor start: Apify's standard start event ($0.00005).
• There is no separate charge per dataset item.

A daily permit monitor for a few parishes usually delivers only a handful of wells, so it costs pennies a month. A full statewide pull of about 247,000 wells costs about $1,235, and 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 wells that actually reach your dataset.

Estimated compute cost

Default memory is 512 MB. A small filtered run, such as the sample input above, typically finishes in under a minute and costs well under $0.01 in Apify compute on top of the event charges. A full statewide pull of about 247,000 wells reads about 250 pages from SONRIS and usually takes 10 to 30 minutes, on the order of $0.10 to $0.50 in compute depending on SONRIS response times, plus about $1,235 in well-record events.

Data source and freshness

Data comes from the SONRIS GIS Office of Conservation well layer published by the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources. The map layer is refreshed by the state and can trail the SONRIS permit reports by days or weeks, so very recent permits may appear later than they do in the state's own daily reports. sourceUpdatedAt tells you when the state last updated each row.

Source endpoint: https://sonris-gis.dnr.la.gov/arcgis/rest/services/DNRSvc/OC/MapServer/0

Some source rows carry coordinates outside Louisiana because of data-entry errors. The Actor keeps the values as published and sets coordinatesInLouisiana to false so you can filter or fix them.

If SONRIS is down or its firewall blocks the request, the run fails with a short message and keeps every well it already delivered. Run it again later.

Is it legal to use this data?

The Actor reads public records that the State of Louisiana publishes for anyone to view, through the same public endpoint that powers the SONRIS map viewer. The data is provided as is, without any guarantee that it is complete or current. It is not a title opinion or legal advice, so confirm anything important against the official SONRIS records. This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the State of Louisiana.

FAQ

Do I need a SONRIS account or API key? No. The Actor reads the same public endpoint that powers the SONRIS map viewer.

How do I find the right parish spelling? Pick parishes from the list in the input form. SONRIS spells them in upper case without periods, for example ST LANDRY, EAST BATON ROUGE, or DE SOTO.

Can I search by field or well status? Not yet. Filter the dataset after the run, or open an issue on the Actor page to request it.