Oil Ledger — Leases — what it is, in short

What this is:

The LEASE records of OLA013K: 98,388 rows, one per lease per field, carrying the lease name and counties, the oil and gas gatherers that move its production, the commingling permit it produces under, the severance status the Commission has it in, and the overproduction balances it began and ended the tape's twelve months with.

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 41 columns and about 98.4K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

district RRC district the lease is in, as the ledger tape writes it: 01-06, 06E, 07B, 07C, 08, 08A, 09, 10.
field_no The eight-digit field number the lease produces from.
operator_no P-5 organization number of the lease's current operator. Lease records are ordered by it on the tape.
lease_no The five-digit RRC oil lease number.
offshore Whether the lease is on land, in state bays and estuaries, offshore or a combination.
lease_name Lease name as filed on Form P-4, up to 32 characters and often abbreviated.

…and 35 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Find leases running an overproduction balance, see which gathering company takes a lease's oil, and read the severance and removal codes that say whether a lease is in trouble or has left the schedule.

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:

A lease number is unique within its district and not outside it. All 98,388 rows here hold 98,388 distinct district-and-lease pairs, but the same lease number in another district is another lease, and a gas well can carry the same digits again.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

People who want this usually want:

Oil Ledger — Lease Months Twelve months of oil and casinghead gas production against allowable, lease by lease.
Oil Ledger — Wells Every oil well on the proration schedule, with its depth, status and last test.
Oil Ledger The oil proration schedule: every oil field in Texas and the allowable it prorates.
P-5 Organization (ASCII) Every organization with an RRC operator number: name, status, type and address.
PDQ Lease Production by Cycle Monthly oil, gas, condensate and casinghead gas production for every Texas lease since 1993.
Oil Detail Well The individual wells inside Texas waterflood units, with their last two W-10 tests.