Remediation debt dodging

JACKSON COUNTY, Colorado, is not known for oil and gas production. This sparsely populated northern county — population 1,363 — is far from the state’s oilfields on the Eastern Plains, which tap into the huge Denver-Julesburg Basin.

But there is some energy development here, including 110 wells on federal public land. K.P. Kauffman, an oil and gas operator with a history of environmental violations, acquired the wells in 2018 from another Colorado company.

It was a minor transaction, the sort that happens all the time.

One company wants to get older, low-producing wells off its books; another sees some remaining profit in them. According to industry experts, however, transactions like this reveal, in miniature, the billions of dollars of accumulated liability created by more than a century of oil and gas extraction in the country. These wells would cost at least $9.6 million for the new owners to clean up, according to Colorado’s