Texas Railroad Commission flaring and venting data

This data is derived from the Texas Railroad Commission’s Production Data Query dump. The data includes all production and disposition of oil and gas by lease for each month beginning in 1993 and contained approximately 65 million production records from the table called og_lease_cycle_data and 40 million disposition records in a table called og_lease_cycle_disp_data. It was downloaded in October 2021, reflecting data through September 2021.

The data tables were too large to use in R in their raw form, so the Howard Center used a SQLite database to a) join the production to disposition records and convert missing disposition rows to zeros; and b) aggregate by year and lease for the years 2011 through 2021. That aggregated data is the source of this analysis.

You can contact faculty advisor Sarah Cohen for more details on the pre-processing at

Read the flaring and venting annual summaries

lease_master <- 
  readRDS(url ("https://cronkitedata.s3.amazonaws.com/howard/gaslit/tx_flaring_and_venting.RDS")) %>%
  # just get all the column names to lower case
  clean_names() 


glimpse(lease_master)
## Rows: 2,505,685
## Columns: 16
## $ oil_gas_code      <chr> "G", "G", "G", "G", "G", "G", "G", "G", "G", "G", "G…
## $ district_no       <chr> "01", "01", "01", "01", "01", "01", "01", "01", "01"…
## $ lease_no          <chr> "000002", "000002", "000002", "000002", "000002", "0…
## $ cycle_year        <chr> "2011", "2012", "2013", "2014", "2015", "2016", "201…
## $ total_oil_vol     <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…
## $ total_gas_vol     <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 6646, 3006, 5007, 4…
## $ total_cond_vol    <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…
## $ total_csgd_vol    <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…
## $ total_oil_disp    <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…
## $ total_gas_disp    <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 6646, 3006, 5007, 4…
## $ total_cond_disp   <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…
## $ total_csgd_disp   <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…
## $ total_oil_code04  <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…
## $ total_gas_code04  <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…
## $ total_cond_code04 <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…
## $ total_csgd_code04 <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0…

Total flaring and venting by year

Codes 04 for gas and csgd are the flaring and venting numbers. (Code 04 for gas and condensate are different events. )

annual_flaring_totals <- 
  lease_master %>%
  group_by ( cycle_year) %>%
  summarise  ( total_flaring_venting = sum(total_gas_code04 + total_csgd_code04))



annual_flaring_totals %>%
  filter ( cycle_year < 2021 & cycle_year > 2011) %>%
  gt::gt(.) %>%
  tab_header ( title = "Total Venting and flaring in Texas") %>%
  fmt_number ( columns=total_flaring_venting, decimals=0, use_seps=TRUE) %>%
  cols_label ( cycle_year="", total_flaring_venting = "MCF")
Total Venting and flaring in Texas
MCF
2012 49,548,561
2013 75,254,751
2014 91,337,724
2015 105,000,500
2016 84,301,823
2017 90,446,858
2018 154,922,097
2019 206,923,587
2020 122,997,438