On the edge of Longmont, in an alfalfa field flanked by houses on one side and a Costco to the north, black oil started bubbling up through the ground. Not from a drilling rig. Not from a spill truck. From a well that had been plugged and buried almost 27 years earlier, on land the property owner didn't even know had a well beneath it.
That property owner was a Longmont-based concrete company. The field was destined for homes. A school, a city recreation center, and a museum sat nearby. And for a while, none of that mattered, because a well drilled in 1985 had decided, on its own timeline, to leak.
Every buyer who closes on a home in Longmont signs a disclosure that describes exactly this kind of risk. Colorado has required it on every residential contract since January 1, 2016. Most people skim it the way they skim the arbitration clause on a phone plan. In Longmont, that paragraph isn't a hypothetical. It's a description of the ground you're standing on.
What the paragraph actually says
Colorado's mandatory oil and gas disclosure statute spells out, in plain and often all-caps language, that the surface estate of a property may be owned separately from the mineral estate underneath it, and that a transfer of the surface doesn't necessarily transfer the minerals. It goes further: third parties may own or lease those mineral interests, and they may have the legal right to enter and use your surface to get to them, sometimes under a recorded surface use agreement. The listed activity ranges from surveying and drilling to reworking old wells and running gas gathering facilities. It also says, pointedly, that this disclosure doesn't create any new duty for the seller, the agent, or the title company to go dig up information that doesn't already exist in the file.
That last part matters. The disclosure tells you the risk exists. It does not promise anyone has checked whether it applies to your specific parcel.
Why Longmont buyers assume it doesn't apply here
Longmont has a genuine, hard-won story to tell about oil and gas, and it's a story locals are proud of. In November 2012, residents voted for Amendment 300, banning fracking inside city limits. The Colorado Supreme Court overturned that ban in 2016. Rather than accept defeat, the city kept negotiating, and in 2018 it reached an agreement with TOP Operating Company and Cub Creek Energy that paid the operators $3 million to plug eight active wells, relinquish 11 future drilling sites, and abandon 80 potential well permits, with a promise never to drill inside city limits again. The first well closure was required within 120 days of signing.
That's a real win, and it's the reason so many Longmont residents believe oil and gas is a settled issue here. As Longmont's mayor put it while testifying at the state capitol, the city had done everything within its power to protect residents from further oil and gas development. She wasn't wrong. But "no new drilling" and "no oil and gas history" are two different sentences, and the second one isn't true.
The paper trail that's still on file
According to the city's own accounting, Longmont currently has three categories of old oil and gas sites within its limits, and the city hired Terracon Consultants to formally assess them.
| Category | Count |
|---|---|
| Plugged and abandoned wells | 17 |
| Dry, drilled, and abandoned wells | 5 |
| Abandoned locations, never drilled | 21 |
Forty-three sites, all inside a city that fought and won a real battle to stop new drilling. The buyout closed the door on future permits. It didn't erase the record of what's already in the ground, and it didn't come with a guarantee attached to any individual property.
The well that came back
The Tanaka 1-11 well is the clearest illustration of why "plugged" isn't the same as "gone." Drilled to 6,800 feet by Noarko Resources in 1985, back when the land sat in unincorporated Boulder County, the well passed through Apex Operating Co. before landing with a Longmont-based operator, Meyer Oil Co., in 1990. Meyer Oil racked up enough violations that the state revoked its certification in 1995. That December, the well was plugged with a cast iron bridge plug set at 6,250 feet and cement plugs at 580 feet and the surface, and roughly 6,250 feet of steel casing was pulled out for reuse. Meyer Oil filed for bankruptcy the following year. In 2011, state regulators released the $30,000 blanket bond that had covered the plugging work.
Then, decades later, oil surfaced in that alfalfa field. As The Colorado Sun reported, the property owner's application for help was supported by the City of Longmont, the Town of Erie, and both Boulder and Adams counties, and development on the site stalled while the well was addressed. A Cornell engineering professor who studies well integrity summed up the underlying problem simply: some wells leak right away, and some hold for 50 or 60 years. There's no way to know which one sits under a given lot just by looking at a plat map.
What the buyout actually changed, and what it didn't
The 2018 agreement stopped new drilling. It did nothing to change who owns the minerals under any given Longmont property, and it did nothing to protect individual homeowners the way it protected the city's own mineral interests. That distinction became a statewide issue in 2023, when state senator Sonya Jaquez Lewis introduced a bill after having mineral rights under her own Longmont farm taken through forced pooling without her consent. Her bill failed in committee that year. A revised version, SB24-185, passed in 2024 and was signed in Boulder, but it only exempts oil and gas owned by local governments and school districts from forced pooling. Private mineral owners, including ordinary homeowners whose predecessor sold or reserved the mineral rights generations ago, still don't get that protection.
That's the gap the disclosure paragraph is pointing at. Your city can win a buyout. It can pass a law protecting its own minerals. Neither one tells you who owns what's under your specific address.
What to actually do with this at your closing table
If you're buying or selling in Longmont, three things are worth doing before you treat that disclosure page as filler:
- Check the city's public oil and gas map for the parcel, especially if the property sits near older annexed land or edge-of-town subdivisions similar to the ground near Sandstone Ranch and Union Reservoir.
- Ask your title company whether Schedule B lists a recorded severance of the mineral estate. If it does, that's not boilerplate either, and it's worth a conversation before you waive your title objection deadline.
- Treat "plugged and abandoned" as a status, not a guarantee. The Tanaka well was plugged correctly by the standards of 1995. It still came back.
None of this means Longmont is uniquely risky. Front Range counties collectively carry roughly 22,000 plugged and abandoned wells, with the heaviest concentration in Weld County. It means Longmont is a city where this disclosure has a documented, specific, local answer instead of a generic one, and buyers who take thirty seconds to ask about it are better positioned than buyers who don't.
FAQ
Does the oil and gas disclosure affect my mortgage approval? Not by itself. It's a disclosure, not a title defect. If a title search turns up a recorded surface use agreement or mineral severance, your lender's title insurer will want that addressed as part of underwriting, but the disclosure language alone doesn't stop a loan.
Do I need to hire a landman before buying a house? For a typical single-family purchase, no. It becomes worth considering if you're buying acreage, rural property, or a parcel where the title commitment flags an existing mineral severance you want to understand fully.
Is fracking actually banned in Longmont right now? No. The 2012 ban was overturned by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2016. What stopped active drilling was the 2018 buyout agreement with TOP Operating and Cub Creek Energy, which is a negotiated outcome rather than a standing legal prohibition.
Does buying new construction avoid this issue? Not automatically. Some of the platted subdivisions built in the last two decades sit on land that was farmland or open acreage when these wells were originally drilled. The build year of the house has no bearing on what's recorded for the land underneath it.
If you're getting ready to buy or list in Longmont and want someone who reads the disclosure page as carefully as the inspection report, that's the kind of groundwork Smart Moves with Michelle does before you ever get to closing. Let's make your smart move. Get a free local market update and a straight answer on what's actually on file for your address.
