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Well Layers by County

Original only Shapefile Has coordinates

Surface and bottomhole well locations as shapefiles, county by county.

Get the data

Free. You will be asked to confirm an email address before the files are built — that is the only gate, and it is there so we can tell you when a large export is ready.

What this is

RRC's GIS export of well locations: surface points, bottomhole points and the arcs joining them for directional and horizontal wells, produced county by county from the Commission's own map system.

The symbology in the layer encodes well type and status, and is documented in the digital map user's guide.

What you can do with it

Get RRC's own rendering of where wells are, including the surface-to-bottomhole arcs that show lateral direction and length.

Gotchas

Every RRC map layer is published in the Geographic coordinate system in decimal degrees on the NAD27 datum — EPSG:4267. That is not what web mapping expects. Overlaying it on anything modern without reprojecting to WGS 84 puts Texas wells roughly 100 metres from where they belong.

Files are packaged county by county under RRC's 8.3 naming convention, so a statewide layer means merging 255 files: one per county on the odd codes 001 to 507, plus a FED bundle covering federal offshore waters. Merging the 254 county files alone silently drops everything offshore.

This is mirrored whole rather than decoded, and that is the right shape for it: a shapefile is a working format, not an encoding to be undone, and every GIS tool opens one. Read the datum note above before you overlay it on anything -- that is the part that goes wrong quietly.

Record layout

0 columns.

We have not transcribed the record layout for this dataset yet. The RRC manual linked under “Where this comes from” is the authoritative description in the meantime.

Where this comes from

Published by
Texas Railroad Commission — the original page
Original format
Shapefile ArcView shapefile — several files that must be kept together.
RRC publishes
Updated twice a week (Twice a week.)
RRC download link
GoAnywhere MFT
Record layout manual

EZRRC is an independent mirror of public-domain data published by the Texas Railroad Commission. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the RRC. For any legal or regulatory purpose, verify against the official RRC release.

Written about this dataset

  • Start here — what the Texas RRC actually publishes The Railroad Commission gives away roughly sixty oil and gas datasets. This is the map: which files exist, what each one is really about, and how they hang together once you know the join keys. 6 min
  • RRC districts and counties Districts are the RRC's administrative geography, they are not numeric, they do not nest cleanly inside anything you already have, and half the datasets are partitioned by them. Here is how to handle both districts and counties. 6 min
  • Texas well, pipeline and survey shapefiles — downloading RRC GIS layers and converting to GeoPackage or KML The Commission publishes its map data as shapefiles, one zip per county, in a 1927 datum. Here is what is in the well, pipeline, survey and base layers, how to get a statewide layer out of 255 files, how to reproject and convert them — and when a GeoPackage of the parsed permit or wellbore data is the better answer. 7 min
  • Using the EZRRC API and Python SDK Query any RRC dataset over HTTP, resolve code values, request an export in any format, and assemble a cross-dataset view of a single well — with curl, with the Python SDK, and from an MCP-capable assistant. 5 min

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