When oil and gas operators don’t clean up their mess, Colorado takes on the costs and challenges

ADAMS COUNTY, Colo. — When Michael Hickey walks around an old oil well site, he’s prepared for the dangers. He wears fire retardant clothing, a hard hat and protective glasses. He fences off hazardous areas to keep others away. In five years of supervising Colorado’s Orphaned Well Program, he said, “we haven’t had an accident yet.” But Colorado’s backlog of wells needing cleanup continues to grow, increasing the challenges and costs for the state.

Denver7 Investigates met up with Hickey at one of the state’s “orphan” wells. These are older wells, totally depleted by their operators, who are then unable or unwilling to plug them. Often the operators declare bankruptcy “and leave them for us,” Hickey said.

Right now, Colorado is in the process of cleaning up more than 900 orphan wells and roughly twice as many orphaned areas where drilling and production happened.

To uncover the potential threats posed by old, unplugged wells, Denver7 Investigates partnered with ABC News Investigates and local news stations across the country. This nationwide investigation, Zombie Wells: The Threat Beneath, tested a total of 76 wells across five states and found that more than half were leaking oil or combustible gas at the time.

Denver7 Investigates went out to more than a dozen well locations in northern Colorado to check for leaks. We were equipped with a handheld gas detector and a safety device that monitors ambient air quality. These devices can detect hundreds of combustible gases, including climate-warming methane.

At orphan well locations already under Colorado’s care, we did not find any emissions detected by our monitors. But we found low-producing wells are more prone to problems, with risks to health and the environment. These old wells are expensive to maintain and plug, which puts some operators at high risk of soon deserting hundreds or thousands of wells into the state’s Orphaned Well Program.

Read more and watch the accompanying video on Denver7.com