What this is:

The 21 OLFLDRUL segment of the statewide field tape.

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 22 columns and about 8.6K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

  • district_no RRC district as the FL tape stores it, 01 to 14 — the INTERNAL number, not the designation the industry prints.
  • field_no The eight-digit RRC field number: five digits of field, then three of reservoir.
  • rule_seq Which rule under this field, counting from 1 in the order the tape carries them — newest first, the undated rule last.
  • rule_effective_date When this oil rule took effect, decoded from the tape's 99999999 minus the date.
  • proration_eff_date Date the allocation formula took effect for this prorated field, CCYYMMDD on the tape.
  • rule_suspend_date When the rule was suspended or rescinded and the field reverted to statewide spacing.

…and 16 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Find the oil fields under a given density rule, or those whose allowable is split per well rather than by acreage.

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:

rule_effective_date is null on 5,473 of the 8,565 rules — the standing rule with no order date behind it — so rules are numbered by position rather than dated. diagonal_code only ever reads 'CC' here: no oil rule on this tape measures the diagonal well to corner. docket_suffix and rules_not_reliable_flag are empty in every row.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

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