Texas Mineral Radar → research

Texas stopped publishing which drilling permits got a spacing exception

Counted from the Railroad Commission's own monthly permit files · 41 months · updated 2026-06

Texas has a rule about how close to your property line someone else can drill. It is called Rule 37. An operator who wants to drill closer than the rule allows has to ask for an exception, and the people whose minerals could be drained get to be told about it and object. Until spring 2024 you could see which permits had gone through that process, because the case number was printed in the Commission's public permit file. Then it stopped.

What changed

Every month the Railroad Commission posts a file of the drilling permits filed that month. One of the fields in it is the Rule 37 case number: if a permit needed a spacing exception, the number of that case is right there on the record.

For the 16 months from January 2023 through April 2024, that field was filled in on 54% of permits — 8,974 out of 16,471. In May 2024 it dropped to 28.7%. In June it was 2.4%. From July 2024 through 2026-06 — 23 monthly files and 20,407 permits — it has been filled in 8 times.

The Commission still grants spacing exceptions. Nothing suggests it stopped. What went away is the ability of anyone outside the agency to see, from the public file, which permits got one.

Why a mineral owner should care

Rule 37 is the rule that exists to protect you from the well next door. If a neighbour drills closer to the line than standard spacing allows, the well can pull oil and gas out from under your tract. The exception process is where you find out and where you get to object.

When the case number was in the file, a mineral owner — or anyone watching on their behalf — could scan every permit filed in their county and see which ones had asked to drill close. That check is no longer possible from the public permit file. It is the single biggest reason this site does not promise to alert you about spacing exceptions: we cannot see them either, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can still see, and do alert on, is a new permit filed near your tract.

Month by month

Permits counted from the Commission's end-of-month drilling-permit file. "With a case number" counts permit records carrying a non-blank, non-zero Rule 37 case number.

Highest month in the series: 59.4%. May 2025 is absent from the Commission's share and is not counted in either period.

How this was counted, and what it does not say

We read the Commission's own end-of-month permit files directly and counted the field, month by month, using the same reader for every file. The share is not an estimate.

Two things this does not establish. First, it is about the bulk permit file. Contested spacing cases still turn up in the Commission's Oil & Gas Docket file once they have been adjudicated, which is later, and only for the ones somebody fought. Second, each monthly file holds only that month's filings — there is no permit that appears in two of them — so this says nothing about whether older records were changed.

Get the numbers

The month-by-month counts are a free CSV: spacing-exceptions.csv. Reuse them anywhere, credit appreciated. If you are a reporter or researcher and want the underlying per-permit extract, reply to any email from us and a human will send it.

Source: RRC drilling-permit files. This page maps drilling activity and what the state discloses about it. It is not a record of mineral ownership, which lives in county deed records.