FRED recently added 7 data series about the business conditions and outlook of upstream oil and gas energy firms headquartered in the 11th Federal Reserve District.

In industry lingo, upstream refers to oil and gas exploration and production and the related services that support those activities. Geographically, the 11th District of the Federal Reserve consists of Texas, northern Louisiana, and southern New Mexico. The regional Reserve Bank in the 11th District is in Dallas, Texas, so the dataset itself is called the Dallas Fed Energy Survey.

The FRED graph above shows the three broadest indicators of business conditions captured by the survey:

• level of business activity (solid blue line)
• company outlook (dashed green line)
• uncertainty (dashed orange line)

The data are reported as diffusion indexes. You can read about another example of this type of index here. In short: The direction of change in the value of the index indicates rising or falling values of the underlying concept being assessed.

What do the indexes show?

The indexes of company outlook and level of business activity generally move in the same direction and at the same time. Between Q3 2024 and Q3 2025 (the last four observations available at the time of this writing), those indexes ranged between 7.1 and -17.6. That suggests relatively stable outlook and activity conditions. However, the index measuring uncertainty was above 40 during most of that time. This is noteworthy because, since 2016, when data are first available, the uncertainty index generally moved in the opposite direction of the indexes of business activity and company outlook. Perhaps that could be expected because oil and gas exploration and production activities are large scale and expensive operations that take many years to plan and execute. In short: Uncertainty undermines this industry.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for and select “Dallas Fed Energy Survey – Level of Business Activity.” Click on the “Edit Graph” button and select the “Add Line” tab to search for “Dallas Fed Energy Survey – Company Outlook.” Don’t forget to click on “Add data series.” Repeat the last two steps to search for and add “Dallas Fed Energy Survey – Uncertainty.”

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.