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Historical Ledger — Statewide Oil

Every Texas oil lease's month back to January 1993 — allowable, production, movable balance and dispositions. 60.4 million rows.

What this is:

LAD001, the oil half: S.LDF900OL, a 160-byte EBCDIC tape of the Commission's Historical Ledger database, 60,429,037 records. It is decoded here into four tables -- 158,566 oil LEASES, each with up to 378 monthly CYCLES reaching back to January 1993, and hanging off every cycle the oil dispositions by code (14,390,419 rows) and the casinghead gas dispositions (16,337,958). 29,542,093 lease-months, averaging 186 months each.

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 38 columns and about 158.6K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

  • district RRC district as an INTERNAL district number, 01 to 14 -- not the designation the industry prints.
  • lease_no The RRC oil lease number as a whole number, so PDQ's '02092' is 2092 here.
  • og_code The tape's own record marker, 'O' for an oil lease, on all 158,566 rows.
  • movable_balance Barrels in storage on the lease that were produced within the allowable and so may legally be moved off it.
  • beginning_oil_status Cumulative oil overproduction, in barrels, through the cycle most recently rolled off the LIVE production database -- RRC's own words.
  • beginning_csghd_status The same for casinghead gas, in MCF. Non-zero on 1,029 leases and reaching 844,368 MCF.

…and 32 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Take a lease's whole allowable-and-production history in one query -- 378 months for the leases that have been on the schedule since 1993 -- and then ask where the oil went: 9,988,334 truck dispositions and 2,698,367 pipeline ones across three decades, 1,441,709 skim-oil lines, and 16.3 million casinghead gas dispositions with 2,265,836 of them vented or flared.

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.

Worth knowing before use:

THE DISTRICT IS THE INTERNAL NUMBER, 01-14, not the designation RRC prints: 07 is 6E, 08 is 7B, 09 is 7C, 10 is District 08, 11 is 8A, 13 is 09 and 14 is District 10. 12 (8B) is not used.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

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