Four new shelf wells, forty in deepwater: what 2026 Gulf permit totals through September say about future P&A

Every well drilled today is a well someone will plug later. That makes drilling permits the earliest public signal of decommissioning work — earlier than any idle-iron clock, and decades earlier than a contract.

The regulator publishes a running count of well permit approvals in the Gulf. The 2026 table is short, and it says more about the future plugging market than its size suggests.

The numbers

The table splits approvals by permit type and by water depth. The regulator defines shallow water here as less than 500 feet and deep water as greater than 500 feet. The page was last updated on 1 October 2026, so the annual totals below cover January through September.

Permit type	Shallow	Deep
New well	4	40
Revised new well	16	281
Bypass	2	15
Revised bypass	0	55
Sidetrack	19	12
Revised sidetrack	45	58
Total	86	461

That is 547 approvals in all. Deepwater accounts for 461 of them, or 84%.

Most approvals are revisions

Read the revised rows first, because they are the largest. 455 of the 547 approvals — 83% — revise an earlier permit.

A revision is changed work on a wellbore the regulator already knows about: a new casing design, a changed target, an updated plan after drilling begins. It is real activity, but it does not add a new well to the inventory. Counting every approval as a new well would inflate the 92 original approvals to 547 — nearly six times the underlying count.

Strip the revisions out and the picture is smaller and sharper:

• Shallow water: 4 new wells, 2 bypasses, 19 sidetracks. 25 original approvals.
• Deepwater: 40 new wells, 15 bypasses, 12 sidetracks. 67 original approvals.

The shelf is not making new wells

Four new shelf wells through September is the striking line.

The shelf is where most of the Gulf’s decommissioning work sits today. GOMDecom’s campaign analysis tracks 1,813 wells without observed permanent-abandonment completion. Five shelf areas — Main Pass, South Marsh Island, Ship Shoal, South Pass and South Timbalier — hold 52.9% of them. Against that inventory, four new wellbores are a rounding error.

The practical conclusion is narrower. The near- and medium-term shelf P&A market is dominated by wells that already exist. Its timing depends on production decline, the Idle Iron clock and operator finances far more than on the small flow of new drilling approvals.

The 19 shelf sidetracks deserve a note. A sidetrack drills a new hole section out of an existing wellbore. It extends the life of a well rather than adding one, and it can push that well’s eventual abandonment further out. A shelf sidetrack is a small deferral signal, not a new obligation.

The shelf's plugging work is already on the record — campaign by campaign. See every tracked Gulf campaign, with operator, block and stage — free account →

Deepwater is still building its future backlog

Deepwater is the opposite case. Forty new wells and fifteen bypasses add new wellbores that will each carry a plugging obligation at the end of their lives.

That scope is distant. Deepwater wells drilled now may produce for years before abandonment becomes a live question, and some may sit in temporary abandonment along the way. Their water depth and completion architecture tilt the future market towards subsea and heavier intervention capability, but the final abandonment method is not fixed by the permit total. It must be read well by well against the available P&A methods.

For a service company, this is capacity planning, not prospecting. The totals do not name a buyer or a date for P&A. They indicate the broad capability mix that future deepwater retirement work is likely to require.

What the totals do not show

Permit counts are a blunt instrument, and four limits matter:

1. An approval is permission, not a spud. Some approved wells are never drilled. The table does not record which ones were.
2. No operator or block. The totals are Gulf-wide. They cannot tell you whose future obligation is growing.
3. No abandonment permits. Plugging work is permitted through separate filings. This table measures the inflow of wells, not the outflow.
4. A partial year. The table was updated on 1 October and covers January through September. It cannot be compared directly with a full prior year.

How to use the signal

1. Separate original approvals from revisions before drawing any conclusion about well count.
2. Treat shelf demand as an inventory problem. The wells exist; the question is when each one is triggered.
3. Treat deepwater demand as a capability problem. The question is whether you will have subsea and deeper-water P&A capability when today’s wells come due.
4. Read shelf sidetracks as deferral, not as new scope.
5. Pair the inflow with the outflow. Permit totals say where obligations are being created; abandonment filings and completion records say where they are being discharged.

The second half of that pairing — which specific campaigns carry open plugging scope today, and how close each is to execution — is what a one-off Opportunity Brief resolves for a single account.

Sources

• Marine Minerals Administration (formerly BSEE), Status of Well Permits in the Gulf of America — well permit approvals by type and water depth, last updated 1 October 2026. Figures as published on the page; percentages calculated by GOMDecom.
• U.S. Department of the Interior, Secretary's Order No. 3451, "Establishment of the Marine Minerals Administration", 10 July 2026.
• Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, 30 CFR Part 250, Subpart Q — Decommissioning Activities.