High Cost Gas — what it is, in short

What this is

Gas that qualifies as high-cost under Section 107 of the Natural Gas Policy Act pays reduced or no Texas severance tax. This file is the certification record: 90,000 rows naming the lease, the well, the operator, the docket that granted it, the qualifying code and the dates that govern the incentive — received, approved, post-approval, first production and spud.

It matters because the same lease appears in the production data …

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 and about 90.7K rows.

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

Find which leases are certified and from when, and quantify how much production is receiving tax relief by joining to the PDQ lease data.

Follow an operator's certifications, and tie each back to the docket that granted it.

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

oil_gas_code here holds the word 'GAS', not the letter 'G' that the production data uses. The district is RRC's internal number, matching the PDQ tables and not the printed designation.

The lease number joins cleanly to the PDQ regulatory lease directory on district plus lease number — but the oil/gas code has to be translated …

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it

People who want this usually want

PDQ Regulatory Lease Directory The lease directory: lease number to lease name, operator, field and well number.
P-5 Organization (ASCII) Every organization with an RRC operator number: name, status, type and address.
Oil and Gas Docket Contested cases, rulemakings and hearings before the Commission.
High Cost Gas (Tight Sands Only) RRC's tight-sands file — which is the whole high-cost gas record, not a subset.
Natural Gas Policy Act NGPA Section 107 determinations.
ST-1 Application Report Severance tax incentive applications filed online since April 2019.