Oil Detail Well — what it is, in short

What this is:

OLA028K. The oil proration schedule gives a multi-well unit one allowable instead of giving each of its wells one, so the wells inside those units are absent from the ledger's well records entirely.

How it is laid out:

The Railroad Commission publishes this as EBCDIC (IBM cp037). IBM mainframe encoding (cp037). Opening it as text gives you nonsense; it has to be transcoded first. We decode it into a table you can open anywhere. It has 39 columns and about 85.8K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

district RRC district the well is in, as the ledger tape writes it: 01-06, 06E, 07B, 07C, 08, 08A, 09, 10, with the leading zero PDQ does not use.
field_no The eight-digit RRC field number: five for the field, three for the reservoir.
operator_no P-5 organization number of the operator of the lease the well sits on.
lease_no The five-digit RRC oil lease number, unique within its district.
rec_no Identifier of the multi-well group this well belongs to, one character.
well_no The operator's well number, six bytes and positional -- the tape right-justifies it, so 58,641 of the 85,974 rows carry leading blanks and well 1 reads ' 1'.

…and 33 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Break a waterflood unit's lease allowable down to the wells that make it up, compare each well's tested potential against the others in its unit, and find wells whose last test is years old.

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:

The test values are POTENTIAL, not production: barrels per calendar day the well is capable of, from the test or computed from production. Texas reports oil production by lease, and this file does not break that rule. 'The last two tests' means the last two RRC holds, not two recent ones.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

People who want this usually want:

Oil Detail Well — W-10 Tests The same two W-10 tests, one row per test, for joining and charting.
Oil Ledger — Leases Every oil lease on the proration schedule, with its gatherers and its balances.
Oil Ledger — Multi-Well Groups Waterflood and secondary-recovery groups that take a lease allowable instead of well allowables.
P-5 Organization (ASCII) Every organization with an RRC operator number: name, status, type and address.
PDQ Well Completion Directory The wells that make up each lease, with API numbers and shut-in status.
Completion Information in Data Format Forms G-1 and W-2: the filings that turn a drilled hole into a producing well.