Wellbore Formation Records — what it is, in short

What this is

Record type 04. One row per formation top recorded for a wellbore: the formation name as the operator wrote it and the depth in feet.

Two million rows of formation tops is a subsurface dataset most people assume they have to buy.

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 6 columns and about 2.1M 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.
formation_cntr Sequence of this formation top within the bore.
formation_name Formation name as the operator wrote it. Spelling is not standardised.
formation_depth Depth to the top of the formation, feet.
ingested_at When the upstream pipeline last wrote this row. Not an RRC field — it is EZRRC's provenance stamp, …

What we add

Build a formation-top map for a play, correlate wells against each other, and find every well that penetrated a named interval.

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

Formation names are free text written by operators, not a controlled vocabulary. 'WOLFCAMP', 'WOLFCAMP A' and 'WFMP' all appear. Normalise before you aggregate.

Depths are measured depth from the elevation reference in the form dates record, not true vertical depth and not subsea.

The full page lists every trap in this dataset.

Get it

People who want this usually want

Full Wellbore Database (ASCII) Every well ever assigned an API number in Texas, with casing, tubing, perforations, formations, plugging and inactive-well tests.
Completion Information in Data Format Forms G-1 and W-2: the filings that turn a drilled hole into a producing well.
Completion Casing Records Casing strings as reported on the completion filing.
Completion Formation Records Formation tops as reported on the completion filing.
Completion Production Intervals The intervals a completion produces through, including open-hole sections.
Completion Stimulation Materials What was pumped into the well, over what interval, at completion.