RRC Oil / ICE Violations — what it is, in short

What this is:

RRC's weekly OIL/ICE extract, published on Mondays, is TWO }-delimited files, and this is the smaller of them: VIOLATIONS.txt, the inspections that found something. Its companion INSPECTIONS.txt — every completed inspection, whether it found anything or not — is published beside it as RRC Oil / ICE Inspections, and the two are meant to be read together.

How it is laid out:

The Railroad Commission publishes this as Delimited text. Separated text, usually with an unusual delimiter such as a brace. We decode it into a table you can open anywhere. It has 18 columns and about 397.7K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

operator_name The operator of the inspected lease, well, facility or site AT THE TIME OF THE INSPECTION -- not whoever operates it now.
p5_operator_no The cited operator's six-digit RRC P-5 number, as of the inspection.
district The RRC completion district of the assigned oil lease or gas well ID at the time of the inspection, written the way RRC prints it (01-06, 6E, 7B, 7C, 08, 8A, 09, 10).
oil_lease_gas_well_id The oil lease number (five digits) or gas well ID (six digits) the violation was written against.
lease_fac_name The name of the oil or gas lease, or of the facility, at the time of the inspection.
api_no The API number of the cited wellbore, eight digits: the three-digit county code then RRC's five-digit unique number, with no 42 state prefix.

…and 12 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Find an operator's compliance record, count major violations by district, and see how long it takes for a violation to be cleared.

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:

Absence of a violation is not evidence of compliance; without the inspections file beside it, it may only mean no inspection happened. That is the whole reason both halves are published. Dates in this file are text as published — eight characters, YYYYMMDD — not parsed dates.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

People who want this usually want:

RRC Oil / ICE Inspections (Every Inspection) Every completed RRC oil-and-gas inspection since August 2015 — 3.98 million of them — whether or not it found anything.
P-5 Organization (ASCII) Every organization with an RRC operator number: name, status, type and address.
Drilling Permit Master Every approved W-1 since 1976 as one flat row per permit — 950,665 of them.
Wellbore Drilling Permit Numbers Every drilling permit number ever issued against a wellbore.
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.
Oil and Gas Docket Contested cases, rulemakings and hearings before the Commission.