Drilling Permits Pending Approval (with latitudes and longitudes)

What this is:

Permit applications in flight: every row is a wellbore on an application the Commission has not approved yet, with the surface location the applicant gave, the nearest town, the county, the district and the operator. RRC writes each extract as eleven }-delimited files with a header row, all carrying the same yyyymmddhhmmss stamp. What is parsed here is file 2, dp_wellbore_pending — the one that carries the coordinates.

How it is laid out:

The Railroad Commission publishes this as Delimited text. Separated text, usually with an unusual delimiter such as a brace. We decode it into a table you can open anywhere. It has 45 columns and about 600 rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

• latlong_type_code The DATUM the applicant's coordinates were surveyed on — 1 NAD27, 2 NAD83, 3 WGS84 — not the form they are written in.
• lat_degrees Latitude as the applicant typed it: decimal degrees on some rows (32.4716, minutes and seconds blank) and the degrees of a degrees/minutes/seconds triple on others.
• lat_minutes Minutes of latitude, when the applicant filed a degrees/minutes/seconds triple.
• lat_seconds Seconds of latitude, when the applicant filed a degrees/minutes/seconds triple.
• long_degrees Longitude in whichever form the applicant typed, matching lat_degrees.
• long_minutes Minutes of longitude, when filed as a triple.

…and 39 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

See intent before approval — who is filing where, days or weeks before the permit appears in the approved file.

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

People who want this usually want:

• 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.
• Drilling Permit Master and Trailer The complete W-1 permit history — every application since 1976 with every trailer segment, 13.5 million rows across fifteen tables.
• Drilling Permit Master and Trailer — Daily File (with latitudes and longitudes) Every drilling permit application, refreshed nightly, with surface and bottomhole coordinates.
• Drilling Permit Master Every approved W-1 since 1976 as one flat row per permit — 950,665 of them.
• Drilling Permit Master and Trailer — End of Month File (with latitudes and longitudes) The same permits as the nightly file, cut once a month as a stable snapshot.