Oil and Gas Docket — what it is, in short

What this is

ODA037K. The Commission's docket: 223,000 cases with the full procedural calendar — filed, noticed, heard, decided, ordered, closed, reopened — plus the examiners, the witness and transcript counts, whether the case was protested, and whether it was granted or denied.

Two child files hang off it: the parties named in each docket and the subject lines describing what it was about. EZRRC publishes both separately.

This is where Rule 37 …

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 57 columns and about 223.3K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

docket_number The docket this subject text belongs to. Join to the docket master on it.
record_type The two-byte record type from the original hierarchical file. Constant within a table; kept so a row can …
docket_number The docket these parties belong to. Join to the docket master on it.
name A party to the docket — applicant, operator, protestant or representative. One docket has several.
docket_number The docket number. Join the name and subject tables on this.
line_no Line number within the docket's subject text. Order by it to rebuild the paragraph.

…and 51 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add

Find every case an operator has been party to, measure how long the Commission takes from filing to decision, and count contested versus uncontested outcomes.

Follow a rulemaking from proposal to completion, and find the docket that set a field's rules.

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 you use it

The original layout stores every date as four separate two-digit fields — century, year, month, day. Upstream reassembles them into real dates, which is why the warehouse columns look nothing like the manual.

The docket number alone is not unique: a suffix and a division qualify it.

Many date columns are empty because that procedural …

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it

People who want this usually want

Oil and Gas Docket Parties The organizations and people named in each docket.
Oil and Gas Docket Subjects What each docket was actually about, in the Commission's own words.
High Cost Gas Every lease certified as high-cost gas for severance tax relief.
P-5 Organization (ASCII) Every organization with an RRC operator number: name, status, type and address.
Certificate of Authorization P-4 (Oil and Gas) Which purchaser or transporter is authorised to move product off which lease.
P-5 Organization (EBCDIC) The operator directory in the Commission's original mainframe encoding.