What 1,200 plugging bids tell us about orphan-well costs

Ask what it costs to plug an orphan well and you will hear a depth figure quoted like scripture: so many dollars per foot. We pulled 1,200 completed bids from the queue to check. Depth matters, but it explains less than half the variance. The rest is access, fluids, and paperwork.

The dataset

Twelve hundred bids across fourteen states, all awarded in the last three years, all with final costs rather than estimates. We normalized to 2026 dollars and excluded emergency blowout work, which follows different economics entirely. Median final cost landed near $82,000 per well; the middle half of jobs fell between $47,000 and $138,000.

That spread is the story. Two wells of identical depth, twenty miles apart, routinely differ by 2x. Depth alone cannot explain it.

What actually drives cost

We regressed final cost against every structured field we had. Ranked by explanatory power:

• Site access (road building, matting, seasonal windows) — the single largest non-depth driver. Remote sites without all-weather access cost 40–70% more.
• Downhole fluids — wells requiring fluid handling and disposal added a median $18,000.
• Depth — real but overstated: roughly $9 per foot at the margin once access and fluids are controlled for.
• Permitting overhead — multi-agency parcels added calendar time more than cash, but standby days leak into bids.

Depth-first estimating is not wrong, exactly. It is just a blurry lens for what is mostly a logistics problem.

The paperwork tax

The quietest finding: packages with fragmented surface/mineral ownership took 2.3x longer from award to spud, and their bids carried a visible risk premium — about 11% on otherwise identical wells. Title clarity is a cost input, and nobody prices it explicitly. We are starting to: ownership complexity is now a field in every package summary we publish.

What this means for bidders

If you bid from depth curves alone, you are leaving money in both directions — overbidding accessible wells and underbidding the gnarly ones. The contractors winning consistently in our data are the ones who price the drive in, not just the hole down. Our fit scores now weight access signals accordingly, and we will publish the full methodology next quarter.