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Oil Ledger — Multi-Well Groups

Waterflood and secondary-recovery groups that take a lease allowable instead of well allowables.

What this is:

The MULTI-WELL records of OLA013K: 3,713 groups of wells that the Commission allows to produce against one allowable rather than well by well. Almost all of them are secondary or tertiary recovery projects -- 1,398 carry injection wells -- and the record counts the producing, injecting, shut-in and marginal wells in each. The individual wells behind these groups are not in the oil ledger at all.

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 25 columns and about 3.7K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

  • district RRC district the multi-well group is in, in the ledger's spelling.
  • field_no The eight-digit field number the group produces from.
  • operator_no P-5 organization number of the lease operator.
  • lease_no The five-digit oil lease number the group sits on.
  • offshore Land, bay, offshore or a combination, on the same code list as the field record.
  • m_record The group's identifier within the lease, one character right-justified in six bytes -- so it arrives as ' 1' or ' A' and the blanks are kept because they are in the file.

…and 19 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Find every waterflood and secondary-recovery unit in Texas, see how many wells each is injecting and producing with, and follow the allowable the group was given rather than the wells inside it.

  • 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:

m_record is one character right-justified in six bytes: it arrives as ' 1', not '1'. Every one of the 3,713 rows is padded. The detail-well tape writes the same identifier unpadded as rec_no, so the two join only after trimming -- 4,945 of 5,000 sampled detail wells find their group that way and none without.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

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