Statewide Oil Well Database — what it is, in short

What this is:

WLA001K, the oil half. RRC's live well database, dumped monthly as one 228-byte EBCDIC record per IMS segment: 293,069 wells on the oil proration schedule, each carrying up to twenty-six monthly reporting cycles, the previous allowables issued inside each cycle, the forms the operator still owes, the W-10 tests behind the potential, casing-leakage and Panhandle detail, UIC pointers and free-text remarks — 12,111,947 rows across eighteen tables.

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 215 columns and about 292.7K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

wlroot_key The eight-digit RRC internal well id.
on_off_sched_ind 'N' on schedule, 'Y' off it.
oil_gas_code 'O' on every row -- this is the oil tape.
district_no RRC's INTERNAL district number, 01 to 14.
lease_no The five-digit oil lease number, unique only within its district.
unit_no Unit identifier, one character; a digit usually names a waterflood grouping.

…and 209 more, all documented on the full page.

What we add:

Follow one well's allowable month by month for two years and see what changed it; find every well whose allowable is being held back for a form (427,648 cycles are missing a W-10, 366,362 a W-2); read the W-10 test history behind a potential, back to 2007 rather than the thirteen cycles the W-10 status file keeps; list the wells subject to Rule 14(b)(2), sealed, or transferring allowable to a neighbour.

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:

Everything on this tape is ON the schedule. All 293,069 roots carry on_off_sched_ind 'N' and removed_reason '00', so a plugged or removed well is simply absent — this is the current schedule, not a history of wells. The wellbore database is where a plugged well lives.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it:

People who want this usually want:

PDQ Well Completion Directory The wells that make up each lease, with API numbers and shut-in status.
PDQ Regulatory Lease Directory The lease directory: lease number to lease name, operator, field and well number.
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.
Statewide Production Data — Oil The live P-1 world: every oil lease's allowable, production, dispositions and remarks, 26 months deep.
Historical Ledger — Statewide Oil Every Texas oil lease's month back to January 1993 — allowable, production, movable balance and dispositions. 60.4 million rows.
PDQ Lease Summary (master) One row per lease with the first and last production cycle it ever reported.