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Natural Gas Policy Act

Every NGPA category determination the Commission has made, one row per docket.

What this is:

OGW003A6, the NGPA master file. One row per docket the Commission opened on an application under the Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978 — the federal framework the Texas high-cost gas incentive derives from. 233,678 dockets, reaching back to January 1978.

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 61 columns and about 233.7K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

  • docket_no The docket number RRC assigned to the NGPA application, and the key of this file.
  • list_key The relative record key of this docket's entry in the interested-party file ROGFPL, which RRC publishes as a separate dataset and this mirror does not carry.
  • well_type GAS or OIL, spelled out, though the manual describes it as a single G or O.
  • district_subscript The district exactly as the tape writes it, which is a SUBSCRIPT and not the designation: 07 is 6E, 08 is 7B, 09 is 7C, 10 is District 08, 11 is 8A, 13 is 09 and 14 is District 10.
  • lease_id The oil lease number or gas well ID the application covers, six digits and zero-padded.
  • well_no The well number, where the application named one. Present on 83,820 of 233,678 dockets.

…and 55 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Trace a high-cost gas certification back to the determination behind it: every one of the 90,732 rows in the high-cost gas file names a docket number that is a docket here.

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:

This is frozen history that RRC still republishes monthly. The determinations run from 1978 into the 1990s; the file is reissued every month, but the rows in it do not change. The district on the tape is a SUBSCRIPT, not the designation.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

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