Federal Land Intelligence Report for Oil & Gas

Before an O&G operator submits an Application for Permit to Drill on federal land, the legal description of the target section needs to answer several questions that a PLSS coordinate lookup alone cannot: Is this section covered by an active mineral lease? What does the production revenue history look like? Is there a protected area designation or wildfire risk score that will affect the permitting timeline?

The Federal Land Intelligence Report answers all of these for any PLSS section — in a single API call.

What the Report Covers

When you run a report on a PLSS section, the response includes:

Mineral lease status — Whether the section is under an active BLM oil and gas lease, including the lease serial number and expiration date. This is the first check a landman runs when evaluating a prospect: if the acreage is already leased, the question is whether it is in your portfolio or a competitor's.

Production revenue data — A summary of federal royalty production revenue associated with the section, sourced from ONRR (Office of Natural Resources Revenue) records. For sections with existing production, this tells you whether the formation is proven and what the revenue basis looks like before you commit to a title opinion.

Wildfire risk score — A federal wildfire risk rating for the section based on USDA Forest Service and BLM risk classification data. In an O&G context, this affects two things: BLM's NEPA analysis timeline and insurance requirements for surface operations. Sections in high-risk zones face additional surface reclamation conditions that can extend permit review by weeks.

Protected area status — Whether any portion of the section falls inside a Wilderness Study Area, National Monument boundary, or another federal designation that restricts surface disturbance. A section that looks clean on a lease map can still be partly encumbered by a WSA boundary crossing the section line — an issue that shows up here, not in a standard PLSS lookup.

Running a Report for a Specific Section

The API endpoint is:

GET /api/v1/report?description={PLSS legal description}

For a section in the Powder River Basin — T14N R8W Sec 22, 6th Principal Meridian — the request is:

GET /api/v1/report?description=T14N%20R8W%20Sec%2022%206th%20PM

The response returns a JSON object with all four data layers for that section. Township America validates the PLSS description against BLM CadNSDI data before querying federal databases, so a malformed description returns a clear error rather than a silent miss.

You can also run reports through the in-app interface at /app/report — paste any PLSS description and get the full report in the browser without writing a line of code.

When Landmen and Operators Use This

The report fits two specific points in the O&G workflow.

Pre-leasing evaluation. A landman building a prospect package for a new play area runs reports on every target section before recommending acreage. Sections with active competing leases, elevated wildfire risk scores, or protected area encumbrances get flagged early — before title work begins, before negotiating with the surface owner, and before the APD process starts. Catching these conditions at the evaluation stage is far cheaper than finding them during regulatory review.

Pre-APD due diligence. An operator already holding a mineral lease runs the report on each drill section to confirm the NEPA conditions before filing. A wildfire risk flag or a WSA boundary affecting the proposed surface location changes the drilling permit timeline by 30–60 days. The report surfaces that exposure in seconds rather than hours of manual BLM database research.

Batch Reporting for Large Prospect Packages

For operators evaluating 50 or 100 sections at once — a typical workload at the start of a new leasing campaign — the batch endpoint accepts multiple PLSS descriptions in a single request. Output is JSON, compatible with standard land department spreadsheet and GIS workflows.

See the full API documentation for batch request format and response schema.

Access

The Federal Land Intelligence Report is available on the Pro tier. Free-tier access covers PLSS coordinate conversion and the basic land search. The report layer — mineral lease status, production revenue, wildfire risk, and protected area data — requires a Pro subscription.

The API endpoint is included in all Pro plans at the same rate limits as the main conversion endpoints. Existing Pro subscribers can start querying /api/v1/report immediately; no separate activation is needed.

Related Resources

• PLSS Legal Descriptions for Oil & Gas — How the PLSS grid applies to APDs, mineral leases, and pipeline ROW work
• PLSS Legal Descriptions for Mineral Rights — Title chain analysis and mineral interest descriptions
• APD Workflow Guide: PLSS and Oil & Gas Well Permitting — From lease description to filed permit
• Township America API — Full API documentation for developers building O&G land applications