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Certificate of Authorization P-4 (Oil and Gas)

Who gathers, buys and nominates each Texas lease's oil and gas, and every P-4 behind it.

What this is:

P4A002. The only dataset here that answers the question 'who takes this lease's production'. The P-4 is the form an operator files to name the gatherer that moves a lease's oil or gas, the purchaser that buys it, and the nominator that schedules it; nothing legally leaves a lease without one. Production files tell you how much came out of a lease. This tells you whose pipeline and whose cheque.

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 137 columns and about 548.1K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

  • oil_gas_code Which schedule the lease is carried on: O an oil lease, G a gas well.
  • district_no RRC's INTERNAL district number, 01-14, which is what this tape stores and what every key and join in this family uses.
  • lease_rrcid The oil lease number or the gas well RRC ID, stored as a whole number, so PDQ's '002092' is 2092 here.
  • district The same district written the way RRC prints it -- 01-06, 6E, 7B, 7C, 08, 8A, 09, 10 -- derived by the loader from district_no, which is what the tape actually holds.
  • field_no The eight-digit RRC field number of the lease's CURRENT field, as a whole number, so field 00046750 is 46750 here.
  • off_schedule Whether the lease is on the proration schedule, written the awkward way round: N means it IS on the schedule and Y means it has been removed.

…and 131 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Ask who buys from a lease and who moves it — the current P-4 is the lease's newest filing (filing_ordinal = 1) and the p4_gatherer rows under it, with type_code G for the gatherer, H for the purchaser and I for the nominator.

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:

A P-4 names authorisation, not transactions. An authorised purchaser may take nothing, and the tape carries no volumes at all. Join to PDQ or the proration ledgers for what actually moved. Two districts, two spellings, on every table.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

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