Mapped Well Locations (Bottom Hole) — what it is, in short

What this is:

The other end of the well: 1,396,053 mapped bottom holes, again with a NAD83 and a NAD27 coordinate and the API number. A well with more than one bottom -- a sidetrack, a re-entry, a multilateral -- has a row here for each, all pointing back at one surface hole. For a vertical well the bottom is under the surface point and this adds little.

How it is laid out:

The Railroad Commission publishes this as ArcView shapefile. ArcView shapefile — several files that must be kept together. We decode it into a table you can open anywhere. It has 18 columns and about 1.4M rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

county_code The three-digit county code, taken from the name of the package this row came out of -- well001s.dbf is county 001.
bottom_id RRC's integer key for this bottom hole.
surface_id The surface hole this bottom belongs to, joining back to texas.gis_well_surface.
symnum The symbol number RRC's map system draws this point with.
apinum The API number with the state prefix, twelve characters wide and holding ten -- '4200132761'.
reliab RRC's positional-reliability code for the bottom hole.

…and 12 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Measure laterals, find every well whose bottom is under a given tract, or map production to where it comes from rather than to the pad it was drilled from.

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.
Mapped — download it straight into Google Earth or QGIS.

Worth knowing before use:

api10 is NOT a zero-padded API. It is the eight-digit API with the sidetrack code appended -- '00132873H1' is API 00132873, sidetrack H1 -- so it is 8 characters on a well with no sidetrack and 10 on one that has. Join on `api` unless you specifically want to distinguish sidetracks.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

People who want this usually want:

Mapped Well Locations (Surface) Where 1.38 million Texas wells are, at the surface, with the API number.
Statewide API Data (dBase) The API-to-lease map: every mapped Texas well bore, its lease, its quad and its plug date.
Mapped Well Paths Which Texas wells are deviated, and how long the path is.
All Layers by County Every map layer for a county in one package.
Base Layers by County Roads, water features, cities and political boundaries as shapefiles.
Pipeline Layers by County Pipeline routes as shapefiles, one layer per county.