You already know the answer. You just can't find it fast enough.
Right now, somewhere in Texas, a landman is toggling between the RRC website, three Excel tabs, and a PDF check stub trying to figure out if a royalty payment is right. An A&D analyst is building a type curve from production data she pulled record by record. An operator is wondering whether the permit that just showed up two miles from his lease means he should accelerate his own development program, but he won't have that insight for weeks.
The information exists. It's in the RRC filings. It's in the production data. It's in the commodity curves and the completion reports and the decades of industry knowledge about how Wolfcamp wells decline and what Delaware Basin GORs mean for economics.
The problem was never the data. The problem is that assembling it into a decision takes days when it should take seconds.
The old model is breaking.
The way this industry handles information hasn't fundamentally changed in twenty years. The tools got shinier. Enverus instead of binders, Power BI instead of charts drawn by hand. But the workflow is the same:
- You have a question. “Is this deal economic?” / “Am I being paid right?” / “Who's drilling near me?”
- You go find data. Pull production from one system. Pull permits from another. Check prices somewhere else. Download, clean, format.
- You build a model. Paste into Excel. Apply assumptions. Build charts. Gut check against experience.
- You make a decision. Weeks later. With data that's already stale.
This is one person acting as a search engine, a database, a calculator, and an analyst all at once. It's slow. It's expensive. And it means the people with the biggest budgets for data subscriptions make better decisions than the people who actually know the rock.
That's backwards.
What if the machine already understood the rock?
BarrelHub is not a dashboard. It's not a data provider. It's not a chatbot stapled onto a database.
It's an analyst that has read every RRC filing in the state, knows 650 articles worth of industry knowledge by heart, and can pull live NYMEX pricing before it finishes answering your question.
Ask it what you'd ask a sharp petroleum engineer sitting next to you:
“What's the average IP30 for Diamondback wells in Midland County completed this year?”
“Is my realized price on the Johnson Unit in line with posted?”
“What's the breakeven for a Wolfcamp A well at current strip?”
“Who just permitted within two miles of my lease, and based on their history, when are they likely to spud?”
It doesn't just look things up. It reasons. It combines live RRC data, commodity pricing, completion trends, and domain knowledge to give you an answer with sources, context, and the rules of thumb that took you twenty years to learn.
Where this is going.
We see three phases in how decisions get made in this industry:
Phase 1: Human does everything.
This is today. You find the data. You build the model. You apply judgment. You make the call. The machine is a filing cabinet.
Phase 2: Human asks, machine analyzes.
This is where we are now. You ask the question in plain language. The machine pulls the data, runs the analysis, applies industry knowledge, and gives you an answer with citations. You make the call, but faster, with better information, and without the $50,000 data subscription.
Phase 3: Machine monitors, human decides.
This is where we're going. The system watches your portfolio, your area of interest, your economics thresholds. It sees the permit filed at 4 AM. It checks the operator's historical spud timing. It recalculates your tract valuation with the new activity score. It flags the royalty check that came in 5% below posted price. It brings you the decision, not the data.
The human never leaves the loop. Your judgment, your relationships, your knowledge of what the numbers don't show: that's irreplaceable. But the hours spent assembling information, the missed signals buried in RRC filings, the stale spreadsheet that was already wrong by the time you finished building it: that part goes away.
What we believe.
Small operators deserve the same intelligence as supermajors.
The information is public. The analysis shouldn't cost six figures.
Domain expertise matters more than data access.
Anyone can pull a production record. Knowing that a rising water cut in the Delaware Basin at 6 to 8 barrels of water per barrel of oil means something different than the same signal in the Midland Basin: that's what turns data into decisions.
Predictions beat reports.
Knowing who permitted last month is useful. Knowing who's likely to spud next month, based on their historical behavior and current rig deployment, changes how you operate.
Every signal should find its owner.
The permit that affects your minerals. The price move that changes your economics. The production drop that means your royalty check will be light. These signals exist today. They just don't reach you in time.
The best interface for complex data is a conversation.
Not a dashboard with forty filters. Not a query builder. A question, asked the way you'd ask a colleague, answered with the depth you'd expect from someone who's read everything.
What we're asking of you.
You're here because you know this industry's information problem firsthand. As a beta user, we need three things:
Ask hard questions.
Don't ask us things Google can answer. Ask us the questions you actually face, the ones that currently take you hours or days. That's where we prove our value or learn where we fall short.
Tell us when we're wrong.
Our knowledge base is deep but not perfect. When an answer doesn't match your experience, that's the most valuable feedback you can give us. Your expertise is what makes the system smarter.
Show us your workflow.
The features we build next should eliminate your biggest time sinks, not the ones we imagine. If you spend four hours a month reconciling check stubs, that matters more to us than a feature that looks good in a demo.
So what is this, exactly?
Texas has half a million wellbores, decades of production history, and an industry that still runs on Excel and phone calls. The data is there. The knowledge is there. What's been missing is something that understands both the data and the domain well enough to turn one into the other on the spot.
That's what BarrelHub is.
We're not replacing your judgment. We're giving it the fastest, most informed starting point it's ever had.
Welcome to the beta. Ask us anything.