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

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. EZRRC …

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 115K 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. The pipeline resolves the three-digit code against national.us_county on load and stores …

…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.

Map permitted surface and bottomhole locations, measure …

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 you use it

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.

application_type, application_well_code and horizontal_well_flag are decoded on the way into the warehouse, so they hold RRC's words rather than RRC's …

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it

People who want this usually want

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.
Completion Information in Data Format Forms G-1 and W-2: the filings that turn a drilled hole into a producing well.
Wellbore Drilling Permit Numbers Every drilling permit number ever issued against a wellbore.
Drilling Permit Master The monthly master file of drilling permit applications, without coordinates.
Drilling Permit Master and Trailer The permit master plus its trailer records, without coordinates.