Plugging orphaned wells: County, Hickenlooper discuss sealing abandoned drilling sites

BY SCOTT TAYLOR STAYLOR@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

Beyond the rusting rigs and the pumps and tanks littered around the site, an abandoned oil well is pretty much indistinguishable from a working site.

It’s what exists under that equipment that has county o cials concerned.

“Every oil eld looks di erent,” Adams County Commissioner Lynn Baca said May 25 standing at an orphaned well site about 11 miles due east from Brighton’s Barr Lake. “ is particular one has some outbuildings and it can have lines in the ground. So mitigating that, cleaning it up, we estimate it will take about $150,000 per well to do that. So with 304 abandoned wells in Adams County, we can’t do that. It’s not fair to make the taxpayers carry that burden.”

Adams County hosted a tour on May 25 of the well site in an unincorporated part of the county. Called the Greenmeier #9-30 site, it features a rusting wellhead and pump jack connected to nearby production equipment and four tanks via a series of underground pipes and owlines.

U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper, an advocate of capping and clearing those abandoned sites, was the guest of honor as county o cials joined with industry experts to demonstrate the steps they must go through to close the county’s abandoned wells once and for all.

“Orphan wells are a constant nagging source of pollution,” Hickenlooper said. “But they are also ticking timebombs especially when they are out in areas that never really became big plays. You have a lot of wells that were built by small operators who didn’t have the resources to properly plug them and make sure they don’t have methane leaking out for the next decade.”

Counting orphans

According to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission’s data, Adams County has 4,617 drilled wells. Of that, 2,895 have been abandoned and plugged.

Commissioner Baca, who is also a member of the state’s Orphan Wells Mitigation Enterprise Board, said orphaned wells that remain unplugged are a di erent kind of problem, and Adams County has more than 300 of them scattered around the county.

Commissioner Baca said the site is a perfect example of an orphaned well. It was rst drilled in 1975 but was abandoned in 2018. at means the owners and operators simply