Railroad Commission of Texas Data Sets (Production & Wellbore)

It is the whole upstream library of the regulator of the largest oil- and gas-producing state in the US, published as a family of discrete products rather than one table. The Railroad Commission of Texas - an agency regulating energy under a name borrowed from the railroads - splits its record into a Production Data Query dump carrying lease-month production from 1993 to current (roughly 25 GB uncompressed, compressed to 5 GB or less), statewide historical ledgers spanning January 1993 to 27 months prior, monthly oil and gas ledgers split by RRC district, a rolling Statewide Production pair holding 24 months of production against 26 months of allowables, PR (P1/P2) gas disposition files, and a P-18 skim oil/condensate report served in JSON.

The well-side products run just as deep: a Full Wellbore database in EBCDIC and ASCII, Wellbore Query extracts, statewide oil and gas well databases, Oil Detail Well, and 26-month W-10/G-10 well status files. Around them sit the regulatory furniture - a Drilling Permit Master carrying latitude-longitude on filings since 1976, horizontal drilling permits, oil and gas field rules, field name and number references, P-5 organization files naming active operators, the underground injection control inventory, P-4 certificates of authority, and county-level pipeline, survey, well and base shapefiles. Every product ships with its own record-layout manual, and the PDQ manual alone pins fifteen columns of the OG_LEASE_CYCLE table - all fifteen reproduced in the dictionary below.

Datadory scores the record 8/10 against a catalog mean of 7.81 across 1,744 datasets. The pooled oil & gas exploration & production slice holds 27 datasets averaging 7.67, and four of them trace back to this one regulator. Get a sample of this dataset and we return rows cut to the districts and leases you name.

The dictionary below is verified against the PDQ manual's OG_LEASE_CYCLE layout, so a shaped lease-cycle row reads credibly even before live records land:

# one lease-cycle row - district 08, July 2024
DISTRICT_NO            : 08         # RRC oil & gas district
LEASE_NO               : 123456     # producing lease
CYCLE_YEAR             : 2024       CYCLE_MONTH : 07
COUNTY_NO              : 302        # RRC county code
OPERATOR_NO            : 081234     FIELD_NO : 25301000    FIELD_TYPE : OG
CNTY_LSE_OIL_PROD_VOL  : 15230      CNTY_LSE_OIL_ALLOW     : 20000
CNTY_LSE_OIL_ENDING_BAL: 4800       CNTY_LSE_GAS_PROD_VOL  : 987650
CNTY_LSE_GAS_ALLOW     : 1100000    CNTY_LSE_COND_PROD_VOL : 7300

The same identifier spine recurs across every product on the shelf, which is what makes the family joinable:

# identifiers shared across products
production ledgers : DISTRICT_NO  LEASE_NO  OPERATOR_NO  FIELD_NO  COUNTY_NO
gas well detail    : LEASE_NO  GAS_WELL_NO  cycle year + month
drilling permits   : OPERATOR_NO  FIELD_NO  latitude-longitude of the filing

Six measures ride on each lease-cycle: oil produced, oil allowable, oil ending balance, gas produced, gas allowable and condensate produced. The allowable pair is the quiet advantage - an allowable is a regulatory ceiling, so production divided by allowable reads as compliance pressure, a ratio nobody recomputes for you. The ending balance carries stock between cycles, which matters when a lease sells from inventory rather than the wellhead.

These blocks are shapes reconstructed from the verified dictionary, not a captured export. Request a sample and live rows arrive cut to the districts, counties, fields or leases you name.

Fifteen columns, every one verified against the PDQ user manual rather than inferred from header rows - which is why this record scores 8/10 on our documentation rubric. Five identify the row (district, lease, operator, field, county), one dates it (cycle year and month), one locates the gas well inside the lease, and six carry the numbers. Nullable positions are marked in the manual, and the volume columns are typed NUMBER(9) - nine digits, wide enough that a gassy lease never overflows.

Additional fields on request: the attribute layouts of the other products on the shelf - Full Wellbore record structures, the drilling permit master column set, P-5 organization, UIC injection and P-4 certificate schemas, and the county shapefile attributes - are pinned against live records when your sample is cut.

One state, sliced three ways. Geographically the products organize around the Commission's ten numbered oil and gas districts plus the lettered splits (6E, 7B, 7C, 8A) and county codes; temporally the archive runs half a century deep at the permit level and three decades at the lease level; structurally the grain changes by product, so a lease-month production question and a well-lifecycle question pull from different tables built for exactly those shapes.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Pick the channel your stack already speaks and set the cadence to match the decision you are feeding - overnight flat files for research benches, direct loads into Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift, or lookup calls for anything interactive. Cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

Normalization happens before anything reaches you. Much of this catalog still lives in mainframe-era fixed-width encodings and character-delimited layouts documented in per-product manuals; deliveries arrive as typed columns in modern formats, dictionary unchanged. Every shipment includes sample rows for validation before your pipeline goes live.

• Lease-level economics and decline work - thirty-plus years of lease-month oil, gas and condensate volumes per district, county and field, the grain decline curves and reserve models actually consume.
• Permit-to-production timing studies - drilling applications since 1976 joined forward to eventual volumes through operator, lease and field numbers, turning the permit ledger into a measurable leading indicator.
• Operator intelligence - P-5 organization files tied to operator numbers connect producing leases to the companies standing behind them, statewide, without any guesswork matching on name strings.
• Compliance and regulatory mapping - production read against allowable ceilings, field rules resolved by field number, UIC injection wells and P-4 certificates placed in the same district geography.
• GIS-backed basin views - county pipeline, survey, well and base shapefiles put tabular rows onto map layers, so spacing, infrastructure and surface context come from geometry rather than prose.

Reservoir and production engineers get the lease-month grain and the allowable columns their constrained-production analyses assume exist somewhere. Energy investors and quants (their oil & gas workflows) treat permit flow joined to later volumes as a leading indicator with a computable lag. Land and leasing analysts read permit intent ahead of production reality, district by district. Data scientists (use cases) inherit a verified fifteen-column layout that feeds pipelines without reshaping, and market researchers (their use cases) anchor Texas claims to the state's own regulator. Developers (builders' use cases) get normalized, typed columns instead of mainframe encodings. Persona-by-persona detail lives on the industry hub.

Within Datadory's oil & gas exploration & production slice of 27 pooled datasets, these neighbors complement the Texas view:

• PUDL Raw EIA Bulk API Archive (v81) - the federal mirror to this state record: versioned national EIA series versus one state's lease-, well- and permit-grain depth. Both score 8/10; the head-to-head continues on the comparison page.
• NSTA UKCS Open Data - the UK North Sea regulator's equivalent shelf (wells, production, seismic, infrastructure), scoring 9/10; useful when the question needs a second jurisdiction with regulator-grade provenance.
• EIA International Energy Statistics - the country-level frame around this state-level detail, at 9/10.
• The wider RRC family inside the catalog: Texas RRC Oil & Gas Data in integrated oil & gas, and the Oil & Gas Equipment & Services well-information slice.

Two glossary notes sharpen the vocabulary: what the PDQ (Production Data Query) is and why its lease-cycle layout matters, and what counts as wellbore data once a well moves from permitted to produced to plugged. The regulator itself has a source profile, and the slice's rankings live on the best-of list.