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High Cost Gas (Tight Sands Only)

RRC's tight-sands file — which is the whole high-cost gas record, not a subset.

What this is

RRC publishes this separately as ngf115.txt.gz, and it is not what the name suggests: it is not restricted to tight sands. It carries all 90,732 certification records, of which 88,964 are tight sands (c107x_code T) and 1,768 are not — 923 category A, 837 F and 8 D.

It is also the same data as High Cost Gas, which RRC publishes as ngf019.txt.gz. Verified against both on 2026-08-07: identical row …

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 13 columns .

The columns you will most likely want:

  • oil_gas_code 'OIL' or 'GAS' — note that this file spells the schedule out in full.
  • district RRC district the record belongs to, written the way RRC prints it (01-06, 6E, 7B, 7C, 08, 8A, …
  • lease_number RRC lease number. Unique only within a district and a schedule.
  • well_number Well number within the lease.
  • operator_number The operator's six-digit RRC P-5 organization number.
  • docket_number Docket number of the high-cost gas determination.

…and 7 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add

Filter c107x_code to T for the tight-sands certifications the filename promises, or leave it off for the whole record. Either way you get a spreadsheet rather than a brace-delimited file.

  • 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.

Worth knowing before you use it

The name says tight sands and the file is not restricted to them: 1,768 of its 90,732 rows carry another category. Filter c107x_code = T if that is what you want.

This is the same data as the High Cost Gas dataset, byte for byte in content — RRC simply publishes it under two filenames. …

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

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