Texas does not publish production for every individual well. That surprises people coming from states that do, and it explains most of the questions about why a well page shows lease production rather than a per-well decline curve. This guide explains what the state actually collects.
Leases, not wells
Operators report monthly production on Form PR, the Production Report. For oil, the unit of reporting is the lease: a lease number within an RRC district, which can cover one well or dozens. The report gives total oil, casinghead gas, and condensate for the lease that month. Individual wells on an oil lease are not reported separately.
Gas wells are different. Each gas well has its own gas well ID within the lease, and volumes are reported per gas well. So well-level production exists for gas wells but not for oil wells.
The practical result: on Petrora, a well page's cumulative oil comes from the lease that the well is completed on, and if that lease has more than one well, the figure is the lease total. Petrora does not allocate lease volumes to wells, because any allocation would be an estimate presented as a fact. Each lease has its own page with the full monthly history, the operators that reported it, and the wells completed on it; see leases.
What is in the data
The RRC publishes its production database as the PDQ dump, which Petrora loads monthly. For each lease and month it holds:
- Oil produced, in barrels.
- Casinghead gas, in thousand cubic feet. On an oil lease, all gas is reported as casinghead gas, whether or not it came up the casing. Read it as "gas from an oil lease".
- Gas well gas and condensate for gas wells, by gas well ID.
- The operator that filed the report, which is how Petrora builds the chain of custody on a well page.
- Allowables and disposition codes, which are regulatory detail rather than volumes.
Petrora also summarizes production per well through the completion record that ties an API number to a lease, which is how a well page can show first and last production months.
How current it is
Operators have until the end of the following month to file, and the RRC's dump reflects what has been filed, not what happened. The most recent two or three months in any dump are incomplete and will be revised upward in later dumps as late reports come in. Petrora loads the new dump each month and labels production figures with the month they are reported through, rather than presenting the latest partial month as current. See how current the data is.
Reading cumulative figures
The cumulative oil and gas on operator and well pages are sums of reported lease volumes since the start of the RRC's electronic records, which begin in the early 1990s for most leases. They are not lifetime totals for wells that produced before that. For an old field, treat them as "since reporting began".