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Drilling Permit Master and Trailer — Daily File (with latitudes and longitudes)

Every drilling permit application, refreshed nightly, with surface and bottomhole coordinates.

What this is:

The permit file most people actually want. It is the OGA049M layout: the permit master and its trailers, plus the '14' surface-location and '15' bottomhole-location GPS records that carry latitude and longitude in decimal degrees. A drilling permit — Form W-1 — is the first public trace of a well. It names the operator, the lease, the field, the intended total depth and the two ends of the hole.

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 28 columns and about 116.5K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

  • received_date Date RRC received the application.
  • amended_date Date the permit was amended, if it ever was.
  • issue_date Date RRC issued the permit. This is the date the industry counts.
  • status_no RRC's status (permit application) number. With sequence_no it is the primary key of this table.
  • sequence_no Sequence within the status number, for amended and re-issued permits.
  • county_code County name, despite the column name.

…and 22 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Count permits by operator, county or field for any month since the file begins, and watch the leading indicator everyone in the industry watches — a permit today is a rig in weeks and a completion in months.

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.
  • Mapped — download it straight into Google Earth or QGIS.

Worth knowing before use:

county_code holds the county NAME, not a numeric code. RRC's own layout calls the field a code and the file contains 'Midland'. This is the single most common way a permit query silently returns nothing.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

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