Over the past couple of years, Colorado has made a lot of progress in the messy fight against orphaned wells, passing legislation to help prevent wells from being abandoned in the first place, imposing fees to help their clean up and increasing the budget and resources of the state agency tasked with plugging wells and remediating sites. These advances are laudable and necessary in our fight against climate and environmental degradation, but they are unfortunately not enough in the face of the problem Colorado is dealing with.

An orphaned well is, essentially, any oil or gas well that has been abandoned by its operator.

Over the course of the life of an oil or gas well, the site is likely to stop producing or reach a point where it is no longer financially viable. When this happens, the owner of the well is supposed to plug the well and remediate the site. The idea is to mitigate the environmental effects and to make the site safe — for humans and nature.

According to the state’s 2023 orphan well report, without intervention, abandoned wells “may impair a surface owner’s farming or ranching activity or other use of the property, harm wildlife, release air and greenhouse gas emissions, or present a safety hazard to the public.”

Put a little more bluntly, an orphan well is an extraction venture that is no longer profitable. In some cases, the oil or gas company that owns the well simply goes out of business. In some cases, the original owner sells the well after its heyday to “less solvent companies that then vanish into a haze of bankruptcy.” In others, the well may be old enough that records fail to show who the actual owner is (which is likely to only occur because at some point the well stopped making money). But in all cases, these orphan wells become a public problem.

On top of the fact that these wells are unplugged and thus potentially leaking oil or gas into the environment, the equipment from the operation is often abandoned on the site as well. One Adams County couple who is suing a petroleum company for orphaning a well on their property was left not only with the out-of-service oil well, but an open pit, aging storage tanks and a dilapidated shed.

Worse still is the potential disaster of a gas line going uncapped. In one horrific instance, a house in Firestone exploded, killing two people, after an uncapped Anadarko gas line leaked gas into the house for months.

That tragedy helped lead to the passage of some of the new rules and regulations for the oil and gas industry in 2022. The following year, new revenue from per-well fees on operators and a dramatic boost in federal aid saw Colorado spend $10.2 million on its orphan well program. According to the Colorado Sun, this figure is double the total amount the program spent in the previous 28 years combined. It also helped the program double its staff.

That is real progress.

But it is also not enough, especially if we are seeing more orphan wells fall into our laps in three months than we can cap in a whole year.

According to the state’s 2023 orphan well report, Colorado capped 61 orphan wells in the fiscal year 2023. But in one three-month period last fall, the state saw an increase of 200 new orphan wells.

According to the Energy and Carbon Management Commission, the state has 1,413 orphan sites and 648 wells on those sites that have to be capped. A U.S. Geological Survey report from 2023 put the number of orphaned sites nationwide between 310,000 and 800,000 but concluded that the total is probably even higher. And one estimate puts the cost of plugging all these wells at $280 billion.

The truth of the matter is that Colorado can and must do more to hold well operators accountable and prevent wells from becoming orphaned in the first place.

This is not to imply that Colorado should not be investing in plugging and remediating all orphan sites — we absolutely should — but we must do more to plug this problem at its source.

An attorney with the environmental organization Earthjustice recently told The Denver Post that the state’s rules regarding the transfer of wells are a “regulatory Rube Goldberg machine, with numerous loopholes.” Capping these loopholes should be a goal this legislative session.

More broadly, it is also time to consider putting an end to new extraction ventures in the state. This, of course, is a fraught conversation, but one that our warming planet demands we have. Thankfully, some Colorado Democrats are pushing to ban new oil and gas drilling in the state, an effort being led in part by Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis, who represents Boulder, Broomfield and Weld counties. With Colorado’s economy in a good place, now might be the time to consider such an ambitious proposal.

The existence of orphan wells is complicated and costly. Some would argue they are the price of doing business in the oil industry, a calculated risk in the search for a financial reward. But the fact of the matter is, we should know better by now. We should know that oil and gas extraction is harmful, both to us and to the environment we so cherish in Colorado. And we should know that laws with loopholes will be abused.

Since 1998, 122,773 wells have been drilled in Colorado. Many are likely operated by companies that will handle them responsibly, who will plug them and remediate the site when they are done. But based on last year’s trend (61 orphan wells plugged by the state, hundreds more orphan wells falling into the state’s hands) things are looking grim — unless we start taking this issue seriously today.

When it all comes down to it, we can’t put it any better than the lawyer representing the Adams County family suing the company that abandoned a well on their property.

“We ask only that the oil and gas companies who come into Colorado respect the same principles that every Coloradan knows and follows when we camp, hike, and explore our beautiful state,” Christopher Carrington said in a statement, “if you pack it in, pack it out.”

Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board