Oil Ledger — Field Months — what it is, in short

What this is:

The F-MONTH group of the OLA013K field record, normalised: one row per field per month, fourteen months per field and 475,146 rows in all. It carries the statewide production factor that month, whether the field was exempt from it, and the per-well, acreage and 'other' factors the field's allocation formula multiplies.

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 13 columns and about 475.1K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

district RRC district of the field this month belongs to, in the ledger's spelling.
field_no The eight-digit field number this month belongs to.
month_ordinal Which of the fourteen month slots in the field record this row came from, 1 to 14, oldest first.
cycle_yyyymm The schedule month this row is for, as CCYYMM -- the only thing that makes month_ordinal mean anything.
per_well The per-well allowable amount for this month, in barrels per day, for fields whose allocation formula has a per-well term.
acreage_factor The acreage factor for this month, for fields with acres in the allocation formula.

…and 7 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Follow the production factor and a field's allocation factors month by month, and see which fields were exempted from the factor in which cycles.

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:

month_ordinal is a slot on a tape that rolls, not a date. Every cycle RRC drops the oldest month and appends a new one, so ordinal 1 means 'oldest month on this tape' and nothing else. Filter on cycle_yyyymm.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

People who want this usually want:

Oil Ledger The oil proration schedule: every oil field in Texas and the allowable it prorates.
PDQ Lease Production by Cycle Monthly oil, gas, condensate and casinghead gas production for every Texas lease since 1993.
Production Data Query Dump The whole PDQ archive: sixteen delimited tables of Texas production from 1993 to today.
Gas Ledger The gas proration schedule: every gas field in Texas and how its allowable is set.
Gas Ledger — Field Months Fourteen months of allocation factors and limited-allowable codes for every gas field.
Gas Ledger — Well Months Fourteen months of gas allowable against reported production, well by well.