Terrifying Headline Regarding Texas Oil And Gas Permitting For Month Of November, 2014 -- Rigzone -- December 23, 2014

Reuters over at Rigzone has this terrifying headline: Texas Oil and Gas Drilling Permits Fall 50 Percent in November.

The only thing missing from that headline is an exclamation point. So I will add one and put the headline in bold:

Texas oil and gas drilling permits fall 50 percent in November!

I didn't read the story; I read the first paragraph and part of the second paragraph.

Out of curiosity, I looked back at permitting for the autumn of 2014, 2013, and 2012, in North Dakota (a simple cut and paste from previous posts, taken from the Director's Cuts).  For 2012 I included December and January (2013) for obvious reasons. Data is below. My observations are at the bottom of the post.

Permitting (2014):

• November, 2014: 235
• October, 2014: 328
• September, 2014: 261
• August, 2014: 273
• July, 2014: 265
• June, 2014: 247

Permitting (2013):

• December, 2013: 227
• November, 2013: 232
• October, 2013: 267
• September, 2013: 287
• August, 2013: 276 

Permitting (2012):

• January, 2013: 218 (note the increase)
• December, 2012: 154 ( significant decrease)
• November, 2012: 211 (all-time high was 370 in Oct 2012)
• October, 2012: 370 (all-time high)
• September, 2012: 273
• August, 2012: 261

My observations regarding permitting history for North Dakota:

• October is generally a big month for permitting (preparing for winter work, building pads)
• the record number of permits was in October, 2012
• the number of November permits decline significantly from October but back toward the average  

Lynn Helms provided the reason for the historical uptick in October permits (that is not my opinion).  I doubt one can say the same for winter weather in Texas, but I don't know.

There is one more comment that could be made, but I will hold off, see if anyone comes up with the same observation -- it requires some background reading, and connecting some dots that may not be intuitive.

Finally, my database shows 206 permits for the month of December, 2014, through the 23rd. There are probably three more business days for the NDIC. Five new permits/day = 15 + 206 = 221, projected for December 2014.

Incidentally, based on the projection of the number of permits for the calendar year 2014, there was a surge of new permits in the month of December, 2014, for the state of North Dakota.

Up above I mentioned that I could make one more comment regarding North Dakota permitting; actually I can now come up with two more.

I'll probably forget what those two comments are. LOL. We'll see.

Actually a third comment. Whatever.