Questions and answers
The things people ask before they download Texas Railroad Commission data: what it costs, how current it is, which file is which, and where the permits, production and well data actually live.
Is Texas Railroad Commission oil and gas data free to download?
Yes. Everything on EZRRC is free, in every format, with no row cap and no paid tier. The data is Texas public information published by the Railroad Commission; EZRRC decodes it out of the mainframe formats it ships in and pays for the hosting with advertising. The pristine original file is offered beside nearly every conversion so you can check our work byte for byte.
How do I download Texas drilling permits as a CSV or Excel file?
Open Drilling Permit Master and Trailer — Daily File, choose CSV or Excel from the format menu and add it to your download; you can filter by county, operator, field or issue date first. The permit file carries no district column, so for a district use the permits pages: the district view hands over that district's counties as the filter. The same pages show a day, a county or an operator at a glance, each with a download button for exactly that slice.
What is the difference between the daily and monthly permit files?
The RRC publishes the same permit records two ways. The daily file is refreshed every business night and carries surface and bottomhole coordinates; it is what you want for anything current. The end-of-month file is a snapshot cut once a month, useful when you need a stable, citable series. The older Drilling Permit Master is the monthly master without coordinates.
Where can I get Texas oil and gas production by lease, county or operator?
The Production Data Query (PDQ) tables. Lease production by cycle is monthly oil, gas, condensate and casinghead gas for every Texas lease since 1993; county, district and operator tables roll the same numbers up. The production pages chart the latest cycle by district and county with a download for each. Production data explained covers what a cycle is and what the ledgers add.
What is an API number?
The well identifier everything joins on. A Texas API number is 42 (the state), a three-digit county code and a five-digit sequence, sometimes followed by sidetrack and completion suffixes; the RRC prints it as 8, 10, 12 or 14 digits depending on the file. Understanding API numbers walks through the forms and how to normalise them, and the Full Wellbore Database is the master list of every API number ever assigned.
How current is the data?
As current as the RRC's own files. Drilling permits are ingested every business night, the Full Wellbore Database weekly, PDQ production monthly, and the historical ledgers when the Commission republishes them. Every dataset page shows when its data last changed and how often it is expected to, and a scheduled check raises an alarm if a feed goes quiet.
Can I get a shapefile of Texas wells, pipelines or surveys?
Yes, two ways. The RRC's own GIS layers are mirrored county by county: wells, pipelines and surveys. And any dataset with coordinates — drilling permits, the wellbore database — can be exported straight to Shapefile, GeoPackage, GeoJSON, KML or FlatGeobuf, filtered to the counties you want.
Do I need an account?
Not to browse, search, read the record layouts or preview the first rows of any table. To download you confirm an email address, because large exports are built in the background and we send a link when the files are ready. That is the only gate, and it is free.
Which formats can I download?
Every decoded dataset comes as CSV, TSV, JSON, NDJSON, Excel and Parquet, with coded columns given a plain-English label beside the code. Datasets with coordinates add GeoPackage, GeoJSON, KML, KMZ, Shapefile and FlatGeobuf. Nearly every dataset also offers the original file exactly as the RRC published it. The API serves the same rows and formats.
Is EZRRC an official Railroad Commission site?
No. EZRRC is an independent mirror of public-domain data and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Railroad Commission of Texas. The Commission's own downloads are linked from every dataset page. For any legal or regulatory purpose, verify against the official RRC release; for everything else, ours is the same data in a format that opens.
How should I cite the data?
Cite the Railroad Commission of Texas as the source and name the dataset and the date of the file — the version is shown on the dataset page and carried in the download. If it helps a reader find the same file, add that it was obtained via ezrrc.com. Every export ships with a checksum so the exact bytes can be verified later.
Why is RRC data so hard to use in the first place?
Because most of it is written for a 1970s mainframe. Eighteen of the datasets ship as EBCDIC, most of the rest as fixed-width text whose column positions live in scanned PDF manuals, and the codes and join keys are documented nowhere in the files. What is EBCDIC and Start here explain the problem; the catalogue is the answer to it.
Something not answered here? The guides go deeper, and the about page explains how the mirror is run. Or write to support@ezrrc.com.