DENVER — A Colorado oil and gas company must come up with $133 million over the next decade to make sure its more than 1,000 wells will be plugged and abandoned — a move the state’s top regulatory agency said shows they're serious about making the oil and gas clean up after itself.
The Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission will decide, company by company, how much to collect as financial assurance. Commissioner John Messner said in hearings last week that “in order for to make the statement that we have some of the strongest financial assurance regulations in the country, it is our responsibility to apply the rules in the way that they were intended to be applied.”
But the company, the commission and the cities of Frederick and Dacono – where most of those old wells are located – all disagreed about how much that cleanup will cost.However, the commission was not convinced. Ultimately, the commissioners decided to require the company to pay $133 million over the next ten years – more than three times as much as the company proposed.