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.

EZRRC parses it into a parent table plus eleven child tables, each keyed on the API county and unique number, and publishes each child …

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. For offshore wells this is the nearest onshore county, not …
  • api_county The three-digit county component of the API number. For offshore wells this is the nearest onshore county, not …
  • api_county The three-digit county component of the API number. For offshore wells this is the nearest onshore county, not …
  • api_county The three-digit county component of the API number. For offshore wells this is the nearest onshore county, not …
  • api_county The three-digit county component of the API number. For offshore wells this is the nearest onshore county, not …
  • api_county The three-digit county component of the API number. For offshore wells this is the nearest onshore county, not …

…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.

Map 1.2 million wells from the WGS84 coordinates the file carries, or reconstruct …

  • 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 you use it

Texas writes the API number four different ways across these files and none of them says so. The permit and wellbore files write it dashed as 42-XXX-XXXXX; the completion file fuses it to eight digits (county then unique, no state prefix); the wellbore file also carries the two halves separately as api_county and api_unique; and …

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it

Full details for Full Wellbore Database (ASCII) (opens in a new tab)

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