TCEQ Air Quality Event Data

Every year, Texas chemical plants, refineries, and industrial facilities report thousands of air quality events to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. These aren’t routine emissions—they’re excess releases, equipment failures, and spills that the companies are legally required to disclose.

What’s in here

  • 100,000+ incidents
  • ~2,000 chemicals
  • Full incident details

This dataset brings that scattered reporting into one place: 100,000+ incidents, with details on what was released, where, how much, and what the company said about what happened.

Download the data

Complete incident database

All incidents with full details: date, facility, chemicals, duration, and company responses, incidents.csv.zip

All incidents by chemical, incident_contaminants.csv.zip 

Chemical breakdown

Top 50 compounds by frequency — Which chemicals show up most? Where? How often? Rankings with year-by-year trends and by unit type.

About the data

Source: TCEQ’s public Exception Event Reporting system. This is the official channel through which facilities legally must report excess emissions, spills, and accidents.

What it captures: Planned maintenance, equipment failures, weather events, accidents, and other incidents that trigger reporting requirements. This is not routine day-to-day emissions—it’s the stuff companies have to announce because something went wrong or exceeded limits.

What it doesn’t capture: Routine emissions within permitted levels, permitted flaring, or incidents companies may have failed to report. TCEQ enforcement actions are separate.

Data quality: Company descriptions are entered by facility staff. They range from precise (times, volumes, cause) to vague (“operational issue”). This dataset preserves what was reported, not what a regulator independently confirmed.

Data & Questions

Full data, the tools to download it yourself, documentation, or questions: See the GitHub repository