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Horizontal Drilling Permits

Forty years of horizontal permits, each tied to the lease it ended up producing under.

What this is:

DAF318. 173,511 rows of 354-byte fixed-width records covering every application to drill a horizontal well since 1985, and the only file RRC publishes that carries the VALIDATED block: the field, operator, lease number, lease name and well number the permit was finally matched to once completion papers were reviewed. That is what this dataset is for.

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 33 columns and about 173.5K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

  • permit_no The seven-digit permit number, stored as an integer — so the leading zeros the fixed-width file writes are gone.
  • sequence_no The amendment sequence, counting down from 99: 99 is the original filing, 98 the first amendment.
  • district_subscript The district exactly as the file writes it: the mainframe subscript, 01-14, never 6E/7B/7C/8A.
  • county_name County name as the file spells it, up to thirteen characters.
  • county_code Three-digit API county code — the county half of the API number.
  • api_unique Five-digit unique well number — the second half of the API number.

…and 27 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Track horizontal drilling across four decades by operator, county, district or field, over a span the rolling permit tables do not cover. Bridge a permit to production.

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:

One row is NOT one permit. A permit appears once per permitted field crossed with each validated completion, and 2,528 records are byte-identical repeats of the line before: 173,511 records hold 144,600 distinct permit+sequence pairs.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

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