Drilling Permit Master

What this is:

OGA049's DRILLING PERMIT TAPE, daf804.txt.gz: the permit master segment on its own, one 510-byte record per approved W-1 filing, carrying the operator, the lease, the well number, the intended total depth, the surface tract, the type of application and every date the Commission stamps on a permit.

How it is laid out:

The Railroad Commission publishes this as Fixed-width ASCII. Columns are byte ranges with no separators, described only in a scanned record layout. We decode it into a table you can open anywhere. It has 70 columns and about 951.6K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

• status_no The seven-digit status number RRC assigns to a W-1 application when it arrives.
• status_seq The amendment sequence, which counts DOWN from 99: 99 is the original filing, 98 the first amendment, 97 the second.
• permit_no The permit number, carried down from the permit segment.
• permit_seq The permit's own amendment sequence, counting down from 99.
• county_code Three-digit county code AS RRC APPROVED IT, which is not always the county the operator reported in the root.
• lease_name Lease name as RRC approved it, up to 32 characters.

…and 64 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Read the permit record RRC's mainframe writes, byte offset for byte offset, over the full half-century — the intended depth, the surface tract, the spud and surface-casing dates, and the amended, extended, expired and cancelled dates that say what became of the permit.

There is more on the full page, including what this joins to.

• Decoded out of the Commission's original format into something Excel opens.
• Filterable before you download, so you can take one county instead of the whole state.
• The Commission's single-letter codes translated into words.

People who want this usually want:

• Horizontal Drilling Permits Forty years of horizontal permits, each tied to the lease it ended up producing under.
• Full Wellbore Database (ASCII) Every well ever assigned an API number in Texas, with casing, tubing, perforations, formations, plugging and inactive-well tests.
• P-5 Organization (ASCII) Every organization with an RRC operator number: name, status, type and address.
• RRC Oil / ICE Inspections (Every Inspection) Every completed RRC oil-and-gas inspection since August 2015 — 3.98 million of them — whether or not it found anything.
• Statewide Field Data The mainframe's field master: every oil and gas field in Texas with its rules, its allocation formulas and 10.5 million rows of allowable and production history.
• RRC Oil / ICE Violations Every statewide rule an RRC inspector wrote up since August 2015: which rule, whether it was major, and what enforcement followed.