Wellbore Remarks — what it is, in short

What this is:

Record type 08. Continuation lines of free text, each tagged with a remark type code and a line counter. 2.3 million lines of what the district office actually wrote down.

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 2.3M rows.

The columns you will most likely want:

api_county The three-digit county component of the API number.
api_unique The five-digit well component of the API number. Unique only in combination with the county code.
rmk_lne_cnt Line number of this remark. Remarks are 70 characters per line and wrap.
rmk_type_code Remark type code.
remarks One 70-character line of free text. Order by line number to rebuild the paragraph.
ingested_at When the upstream pipeline last wrote this row.

What we add:

Search the Commission's own notes on a well — the reason a permit was conditioned, what was found during an inspection, why a status changed.

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 use:

Remarks are line-wrapped continuations, not sentences. To read one you have to order by the line counter and concatenate; a single line in isolation is usually a fragment.

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.