Wellbore Drilling Permit Numbers — what it is, in short

What this is

Record type 10. Two columns of substance: the API halves and a permit number, one row per permit.

Small, and the most useful join in the catalog after the API number itself — it is what ties the permit world to the wellbore world when the API number on the permit is missing or wrong.

How it is laid out

The Railroad Commission publishes this as Fixed-width ASCII. Columns are byte ranges with no separators, described only in a scanned record layout. We decode it into a table you can open anywhere. It has 4 columns and about 704.5K rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

api_county The three-digit county component of the API number. For offshore wells this is the nearest onshore county, not …
api_unique The five-digit well component of the API number. Unique only in combination with the county code.
permit_number A drilling permit number associated with this bore. One bore can carry many: an original drill permit plus …
ingested_at When the upstream pipeline last wrote this row. Not an RRC field — it is EZRRC's provenance stamp, …

What we add

Follow a wellbore back through every permit filed against it, and go the other way from a permit number to the hole that was actually drilled.

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.

Worth knowing before you use it

A wellbore usually has several permits. The wellbore root record's newest_drl_pmt_nbr is only the most recent one; this table is the full list.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it

People who want this usually want

Completion Information in Data Format Forms G-1 and W-2: the filings that turn a drilled hole into a producing well.
Full Wellbore Database (ASCII) Every well ever assigned an API number in Texas, with casing, tubing, perforations, formations, plugging and inactive-well tests.
Drilling Permit Master and Trailer — Daily File (with latitudes and longitudes) Every drilling permit application, refreshed nightly, with surface and bottomhole coordinates.
RRC Oil / ICE Inspections and Violations Inspections that found a violation: which rule, whether it was major, and what enforcement followed.
Completion Casing Records Casing strings as reported on the completion filing.
Completion Formation Records Formation tops as reported on the completion filing.