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Mapped Well Paths

Which Texas wells are deviated, and how long the path is.

What this is:

187,229 wells whose surface hole and bottom hole are joined by a mapped path -- the deviated and horizontal wells. Each row names both ends and the length of the arc between them. The path's geometry is a polyline and lives only in the shapefile itself, which is mirrored on this site under Well Layers by County.

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 8 columns and about 187.5K 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 The bottom hole this path ends at, joining to texas.gis_well_bottom. 187,206 of the 187,229 paths resolve.
  • surface_id The surface hole this path starts from, joining to texas.gis_well_surface. 187,183 of the 187,229 paths resolve.
  • api10 NOT a zero-padded API.
  • api The eight-digit API number of the well this path belongs to.
  • stcode The sidetrack code, two characters, blank on a well with no sidetrack.

…and 2 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Identify the horizontal wells in an area, rank them by lateral length, or get the surface/bottom pairing for a set of wells in one query.

  • 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.

Worth knowing before use:

shape_len is the length of the mapped ARC in the shapefile's own units on NAD27 degrees, not a measured depth and not feet. Use it to compare wells with each other, not as a survey figure.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

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