Dozens of abandoned oil and gas wells sitting near homes, schools, and water sources in northern Larimer County, Colorado are finally getting plugged, as the county moves to clean up a legacy mess left by a defunct operator that spent years generating complaints before its assets became a public problem.
The project targets approximately 50 wells previously operated by Prospect Energy LLC, concentrated in and around Fort Collins and the town of Wellington. The company faced repeated enforcement actions and neighbor complaints about leaks and spills, including from residents of the Hearthfire subdivision, before its financial collapse left the wells without a responsible party to maintain or decommission them. Orphaned wells like these leak methane, a greenhouse gas more than 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, and can threaten groundwater.
Larimer County posted a bid solicitation on Oct. 5 to hire a contractor for the plugging and decommissioning work. That the county is running this process itself, rather than leaving it to the state, reflects a significant shift in how Colorado handles oil and gas oversight. Colorado's landmark 2019 law, SB19-181, gave local governments direct authority over oil and gas siting and operations for the first time, and Larimer County responded by adopting some of the strictest local oil and gas rules in the state. The county now has both the legal standing and the motivation to pursue cleanup on its own terms.
The money to pay for it comes largely from Washington. The 2021 federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dedicated $4.7 billion nationally to plugging orphaned wells, the largest such investment in U.S. history. Colorado received an initial $25 million federal grant in 2022 and is eligible for hundreds of millions more. The state also runs its own orphaned well program funded by industry fees, and tightened bonding requirements in 2022 to reduce the chance future operators walk away from wells the same way Prospect Energy did.
Colorado has more than 200 wells on its official orphaned list, with many more inactive wells at risk of joining it. Larimer County's fast-growing Front Range communities have increasingly bumped up against this legacy infrastructure, and residents near Prospect Energy's old well sites have organized around health and safety concerns for years.
The county will select a contractor before work can begin. No completion timeline has been made public.
