U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper met with oil industry and environmental officials Thursday at an “orphan” oil well to kick off a remediation program for 42 abandoned oil and gas wells in Adams County.

Adams County Commissioner Lynn Baca said there are more than 300 orphan wells in the county, and more than 1,100 statewide.

“Orphan wells are a constant nagging source of pollution, but they’re also ticking time bombs,” Hickenlooper said. “You end up with a lot of these wells that were drilled by small operators, people that didn’t have the resources to properly plug them and make sure that you don’t have methane seeping out. We respect that Adams County is leading the state and setting up the priorities necessary to find these wells, identify the resources, and then get the right professionals in so they get capped properly. Because again, doing this half-assed, it’s just a bad solution for everybody.”

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The event was held at an abandoned well site that was drilled in 1975 and was closed in April 2018. The operator, Houston-based Painted Pegasus Petroleum, filed for bankruptcy in late 2021, abandoning 195 wells throughout Colorado – including the one visited by Hickenlooper, according to reports.

The project is part of a partnership between private industry, state regulators and county officials.

Civitas Resources, a Denver-based oil and gas producer, CarbonPath, a carbon offset registry that helps finance permanent closures of orphan oil and gas wells, and Greenfield Environmental Solutions, which focuses on the remediation and certification of well sites, have come together to deal with these abandoned, often-leaking wells.

“Doing the right thing is always a team effort and as a Colorado-based company, Civitas is proud to do its part because our employees live, work and enjoy the outdoors here, too,” Civitas Chief Sustainability Officer Brian Cain said. “As Colorado’s first carbon neutral oil and natural gas company, we have also committed to plugging 42 orphaned wells in partnership with the state to further improve our air quality and safeguard our communities.”

At the event, Greenfield demonstrated some of its advanced technology for detecting and quantifying leaks from oil and gas infrastructure, including handheld laser devices and optical imaging tools as well as a “sniffer” that can determine how much gas is escaping from a well site.

“We started up a year ago, in March of 2022,” CEO Michael Rigg said. “We built kind of a one-stop shop solution for plugging oil and gas wells. So we own the whole kit of equipment, and we also do the methane quantification and with partners we’ll do the land reclamation.”

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Chris Rice, Greenfield’s environmental supervisor, said plugging the well involves removing various down-hole parts, including the rod and pump that lift oil to the surface, and much of the well casing and then using special cement to seal the well bore permanently.

“The state of Colorado regulates how you plug the well,” said Rice in an interview with The Gazette. “You have to submit a plugging plan. It’s an engineered plugging design. I think that the big difference here is that we go out afterwards and actually confirm that it’s not leaking with a series of instruments. That’s not currently in the rules and regulations. But that’s standard practice for Greenfield.”

After the well has been sealed – if the contract calls for it, as it does with this well – all the infrastructure including tanks, underground piping, other equipment and the pumpjack itself, is removed. That’s along with any contaminated soil, and the surface is restored to a natural state.

“In the long run, if you’re a landowner, you want to get this cleaned up. If you’re worried about air quality and leaks, you want to get this cleaned up. And yeah, it’s tough,” said Rigg. “We plugged our first well in May of 2022. We saw this was a great place to help operators deal with the changing regulatory environment and plug wells.”