Regarding some spikes in oil and gas activity in West Louisiana, the following provides some details. Comments are welcome.
West Louisiana’s September oil and gas story was leasing and seismic work on the southern edge of the Haynesville, not a wave of new well permits. Natchitoches Parish led the courthouse filings. DeSoto Parish remained the producing core. Sabine Parish showed up mainly in seismic surveys. Vernon and Beauregard had little fresh drilling news.
Natchitoches. The parish clerk’s office recorded 88 oil and gas leases in August, plus about six pipeline easements, the Natchitoches Parish Journal reported September 2. That brought 2026 filings to about 571, already ahead of the 405 recorded in all of 2025. July alone had produced 122 leases and rights of way.
Clerk of Court David Stamey said the leases were no longer confined to one pocket of the parish. August activity included the Ashland area, tracts just north of Provencal, several tracts east of Interstate 49, and continued filings around Sisson Road, Johnson Chute Road, and Eight Mile Loop. July filings had already run along Louisiana Highway 6 from just west of Natchitoches to the Sabine Parish line, with a separate cluster of 12 leases west of Ashland.
Stamey also pointed to recent rig start-ups and said a seismic survey in the area had started. Abstractors were still running title back through pre-1900 courthouse records.
Sabine. Sabine Parish is the western end of that same lease and seismic push, not a separate September drilling boom. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries lists two 2026 seismic jobs covering the parish: Haynesville Deep Phase 1, by Seitel Data, in Natchitoches and Sabine, and Haynesville Deep Phase III, by SAExploration, in Sabine. Earlier in the year, mineral leasing was reported accelerating from the Natchitoches side of Highway 6 to the Sabine line.
Public permit trackers show an Ensight IV Energy Management filing in Sabine dated July 7, but September and early October Haynesville permit counts did not add a new Sabine Parish cluster.
DeSoto. DeSoto remains the Louisiana heart of the legacy Haynesville. The visible September item was production paperwork, not a new permit rush. Royalty owners discussed four Comstock alternate-unit wells in Township 12 North, Range 14 West, sections 29 and 32. Scout data listed the wells completed around June 26, with a note that the fourth was completed August 3. Serial numbers cited in the discussion were 255348 through 255351.
Statewide, Louisiana drilling-permit tallies for the 30 days through September 29 showed Expand Operating with six permits and Comstock Oil & Gas–Louisiana and Exco with two each, but those counts were not broken out to DeSoto.
The latest parish-specific permit dates in public Haynesville lists were earlier: Sabine Oil & Gas at Brushy Bayou on July 29, and Spider field permits around July 1.
Vernon and Beauregard. Neither parish produced a September or early October drilling headline comparable to Natchitoches leasing or DeSoto completions.
Vernon ranks near the bottom of the state for oil and gas output and has shown little new permitting. Beauregard still has conventional production — operators including Aethon, Alta Mesa, and Arcadia have recent production reports — and ranks around the middle of the state on barrels of oil equivalent, but recent permit counts are thin.
The last seismic survey tying the two parishes, Burr Ferry 3D, dates to 2019. The nearer midstream item is Cheniere’s proposed Sabine Pass expansion, which includes added compression at the existing Gillis station in Beauregard Parish. That is a project filing, not a September well.
Leasing and seismic do not mean a well will be drilled. Through the first days of October, the new paper in these five parishes was courthouse leases and survey work in Natchitoches and Sabine, and ongoing Haynesville production in DeSoto.