Full Wellbore Database (ASCII) — what it is, in short

What this is:

The spine of the whole catalog. WBA091 is a hierarchical fixed-width file with twenty-eight record types: one root record per API number, then repeating records for completions, form dates, formations, casing strings, perforated intervals, tubing, remarks, plugging, drilling permit numbers, well identifiers and H-15 inactive-well tests.

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 194 columns and about 1.2M rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

api_county The three-digit county component of the API number.
api_unique The five-digit well component of the API number. Unique only in combination with the county code.
api_number The API well number.
field_district District of the field the bore is assigned to.
res_cnty_code Reservoir county code, where it differs from the API county.
total_depth

…and 188 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Answer the question every other dataset assumes you can answer: does this API number correspond to a real wellbore, when was it completed, how deep is it, and has it been plugged.

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.

Worth knowing before use:

Texas writes the API number four different ways across these files and none of them says so.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

People who want this usually want:

Drilling Permit Master and Trailer — Daily File (with latitudes and longitudes) Every drilling permit application, refreshed nightly, with surface and bottomhole coordinates.
UIC Database (ASCII) Injection and disposal wells: permits, authorised pressure and volume, monitoring and enforcement.
PDQ Well Completion Directory The wells that make up each lease, with API numbers and shut-in status.
Completion Information in Data Format Forms G-1 and W-2: the filings that turn a drilled hole into a producing well.
Statewide API Data (dBase) The API-to-lease map: every mapped Texas well bore, its lease, its quad and its plug date.
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.