Wellbore H-15 Inactive Well Tests
H-15 tests on inactive wells: who tested, when, and what the status was.
What this is
Record type 12. The H-15 is the fluid-level or pressure test an operator must run on a well that has been inactive for twelve months. Each row records the test date, the reporting operator, the district, field and lease, the status and the base of usable water.
A million H-15 records is the public inactive-well file.
How it is laid out
The Railroad Commission publishes this as Fixed-width ASCII. Columns are byte ranges with no separators, described only in a scanned record layout. We decode it into a table you can open anywhere. It has 17 columns and about 1M rows.
The columns you will most likely want:
-
api_countyThe three-digit county component of the API number. For offshore wells this is the nearest onshore county, not … -
api_uniqueThe five-digit well component of the API number. Unique only in combination with the county code. -
h15_date_keyKey of the H-15 filing, CCYYMMDD. -
h15_statusWhere the bore stands against its H-15 test requirement. -
h15_operatorOperator number that filed the H-15. -
h15_next_test_ccyyYear the next H-15 test is due.
…and 11 more, all documented on the full page.
What we add
Find wells that have been inactive long enough to require testing, see which operators are testing on time, and combine with the plugging records to identify orphan-well risk.
- Decoded out of the Commission's original format into something Excel opens.
- Filterable before you download, so you can take one county instead of the whole state.
- The Commission's single-letter codes translated into words.
Worth knowing before you use it
The next-test year and month are two separate columns, not a date.
An H-15 record existing means the well was inactive, which is exactly the population most people mean by 'idle wells' — but a missing record does not prove the well is producing.
The full page lists every trap in this dataset.