Nearly half of Colorado’s 52,000 wells produce little or no oil. Who’ll pay to plug them? – By Mark Jaffe (Colorado Sun) / Aug 22 2021
Rules are being drafted to cover the cost of cleaning up obsolete wells. But for rural farmers and suburban homeowners, idle pipes and pump jacks are a daily reminder of how complex and expensive the process is.
Sticking out like a sore thumb in the otherwise bucolic, rolling pastures and fields of hay, sit four rusting oil tanks, “Out of Service” stenciled on their sides, along with a scattering of other weathered and unusable equipment.
For the better part of three years, Jon and Susanne Stephens have, without success, been trying to get Noble Energy to plug four wells the oil company has “temporarily” abandoned and remove the defunct equipment and underground flowlines from their land.
The wells haven’t produced any oil or gas since 2017 and Noble says it will at some point remove the equipment from the fields near Milliken, in Weld County, and plug the wells. “We will notify you when this activity is eventually scheduled,” the company, which is now part of Chevron Corp., told the Stephenses’ attorney in an email.
“When I was living in Iran, this was around the time of the fall of the shah of Iran, they had a saying he’d take the milk and leave the cow,” Jon Stephens, 83, said. “That’s how I feel about the oil companies. They take what they want and leave us to deal with the rest.”
CONTINUE > https://coloradosun.com/2021/08/22/colorado-orphan-wells-cost-to-plug/
