Download Oil and Gas Well Data from the Texas Railroad Commission

Oil and gas sites are a leading source of hazardous environmental pollutants for communities living nearby. This series of research notes will show you how to map Texas oil and gas wells that are on the land’s surface. Although the TX RRC has a newly developed public GIS viewer, downloading this data allows us to analyze it in other GIS software like QGIS and ArcGIS. In this series, I will be analyzing the well data in relation to race and income demographics and then the setback distances between wells and where people live and work.

1. The easiest way to find your county number is to go to the TX RRC public GIS viewer. This is also a great place to see your well data before you download it.

2. Then, navigate to this page where you can download the shapefiles and information about the wells. First, we are going to download the well shapefile. Click on “ArcView Shape File” to go to your download.

3. Find the zip file with your county number and check the box. A download button will appear at the bottom of your browser. If you want the whole State, select all. Download your shapefile of the surface wells, bottom wells, and lines.

4. Extract your file into your GIS folder.

5. We will do the same for the API data. This is the extra information about (most of) the wells listed in the shapefile in a format called DBF. If you import a DBF file into a GIS program like ArcGIS or QGIS, it will read it as a table. We will be using the columns “plugged date” and “completion” to choose our wells. When a well is plugged, it is no longer active. When it is completed, it is ready to produce oil or gas.

6. Download your DBF file using the county number and extract it.

Next, we will work with this data using ArcGIS.

Originally published at http://github.com.