The Texas Railroad Commission was founded in the 1880s during a progressive political movement there against monopolistic businesses, largely railroads.
Its remit extended to more general monopoly regulation first to oil pipelines in 1917, perhaps reasonable as another transportation-related activity, then oil and gas production in 1919. It took on natural gas delivery in 1920, bus lines in 1927, and trucking in 1929.
In the 1930s, as the East Texas Oil Boom developed, the TRC along with the US Department of Interior effectively became part of the structure which managed US, and by extension, global oil markets until the early 1970s, when the US no longer had surplus oil production. In the 1930s, the TRC and the Texas Rangers literally seized wellhead production by force of arms in order to curtail wildly surplus production which was both tanking (so to speak) oil prices (hitting a low of $0.03 per barrel) and premature oilfield depletion through excessive extraction.
(Oilfield extraction at the time largely relied in the inherent gas pressure of the fields, resulting in early drilling producing "gushers" where oil could spout hundreds of feet into the air. Like poking many holes into a balloon or bottle, excessive drilling reduced that pressure, and could often leave much oil unrecovered within formations. Limiting drilling and extraction reduced individual operators' yields but increased the overall field yield. Other countries, particularly those with nationalised oil operations such as Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, etc., effectively arrived at similar trends.)
There are also principles of resource recovery which were either established or enshrined by the TRC, notably "Rule of Capture", a whole 'nother discussion. And the (unrelated) issue of regulatory capture, in which a government regulatory agency overseeing an industry tends to over time answer to rather than govern over that industry.
Wikipedia of course has a good general overview: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzWlrARDVbQ>
Daniel Yergin's epic history of the oil industry The Prize discusses the TRC in the context of the East Texas Oil Boom in chapter 13, which makes for fascinating reading, not only about the oil industry but about the actual realities rather than the theoretical operations of "free markets" and natural resource extraction.
And for those interested in a deep dive, several books, including David Prindle's Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission (1984) <https://openlibrary.org/works/OL9371845W/Petroleum_Politics_...>, Mark A Miller's Oils & Gas and the Texas Railroad Commission (2015) <https://openlibrary.org/works/OL24732694W/Oil_Gas_and_the_Te...>, and William R. Childs's The Texas Railroad Commission (2005) <https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5476040W/The_Texas_Railroad_...>.