The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has added natural gas and petroleum time-series data to its application programming interface (API), a tool the agency said “is ideal for software developers working in government, research, or the energy sector who are looking to design applications for the web or for mobile and tablet devices.” The API is currently released as a beta product.

The newly added data sets add 127,000 time series, summarizing natural gas and petroleum production, consumption, inventories, prices, imports, exports and sales data to the API that EIA launched last October.

The natural gas and petroleum data builds on the API’s existing State Energy Data System and electricity data sets, allowing direct third-party computer access to 569,000 data time series, EIA said.

“Expanding EIA’s API to include information on petroleum and natural gas production, consumption, and inventory trends brings us one step closer to the vision of making all of EIA’s data time series available through their powerful data access tools,” said Gina Pearson, EIA assistant administrator for communications.

EIA is planning to add comprehensive coal data sets and its Annual Energy Outlook data set to the API.

The API is a free public service, but registration is required. Details and API keys are available on the EIA website.