Field Oil Information
The oil half of a field's master record: discovery, testing county, schedule headings and cumulative oil and casinghead gas.
What this is:
The 19 OILSEG segment of the statewide field tape, one row for each of the 33,939 fields carried on the oil schedule.
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 34 columns and about 33.9K rows.
The columns you will most likely want:
-
district_noRRC district as the FL tape stores it, 01 to 14 — the INTERNAL number, not the designation the industry prints. -
field_noThe eight-digit RRC field number: five digits of field, then three of reservoir. -
disc_dateDiscovery date of the field's first oil well, CCYYMMDD. -
disc_county_codeThree-digit RRC county code the field was discovered in, as a SMALLINT. Zero where none was recorded. -
depth_1st_wellDepth in feet at which the discovery well was perforated. 99999 is the mainframe's 'not known'. -
testing_countyCounty whose W-10 testing cycle the field tests on, as a three-digit code.
…and 28 more, all documented on the full page.
What we add:
Rank oil fields by cumulative production since 1970, or by the last 24 months. Find the oil fields discovered in a county or a decade, the ones in the bays and state waters, and the ones exempt from the ending-balance calculation.
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:
original_oil_in_place is zero in every row: the manual says the item is no longer used. The earliest schedule_start_date reads 1800-01-01, which is a placeholder rather than a date. depth_1st_well is 99999 where the depth was never recorded.
The full page lists every trap in this dataset.