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Full Wellbore Database (EBCDIC)

The same wellbore database, in the raw IBM mainframe encoding.

What this is:

Byte-for-byte the same records as the ASCII wellbore file, encoded in EBCDIC cp037 as the Commission's mainframe writes them. RRC publishes both because some subscribers feed the file straight into COBOL systems that expect the original encoding.

How it is laid out:

The Railroad Commission publishes this as EBCDIC (IBM cp037). IBM mainframe encoding (cp037). Opening it as text gives you nonsense; it has to be transcoded first. 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:

Feed a mainframe-era reader without a transcoding step, or verify that an ASCII conversion round-trips.

  • 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:

EBCDIC is not ASCII and is not UTF-8. Opening the original in a text editor produces garbage, and packed-decimal fields inside it are not text at all — which is why the decoded tables here are almost always what you want. Download the original only if you specifically need the Commission's encoding.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

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