Wellbore Plugging Records
W-3 plugging reports: when a well was plugged, to what depth, and with what.
What this is
Record type 09. The plugging record: the date the W-3 was filed, the date the wellbore was actually plugged, total depth at plugging, the cement and mud used, the fresh water depth protected and whether the job was funded by the state.
477,000 plugging records — the definitive answer to whether a well is still a hole in the ground.
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 32 columns and about 481.7K rows.
The columns you will most likely want:
-
api_countyThe three-digit county component of the API number. For offshore wells this is the nearest onshore county, not … -
api_uniqueThe five-digit well component of the API number. Unique only in combination with the county code. -
date_w3_filedDate the Form W-3 plugging report was filed, CCYYMMDD. -
date_well_bore_pluggedDate the bore was plugged, CCYYMMDD. -
plug_total_depthTotal depth at plugging, feet. -
plug_cement_compCement company that performed the plugging.
…and 26 more, all documented on the full page.
What we add
Separate plugged wells from live ones, count state-funded plugging by district and year, and check whether a well near a property was properly abandoned.
- 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
The W-3 filing date and the date the well was actually plugged are different columns and can be years apart.
A state-funded plug number being present means the taxpayer paid for the job because the operator did not — that is a meaningful signal, not an administrative detail.
The full page lists every trap in this dataset.