Commercial wells in El Paso County

2,402 of the 46,491 well permits in El Paso County — 5.2% — are decreed for commercial.

How this group compares

El Paso County holds 10.7% of Colorado’s 22,356 commercial permits, while holding 7.7% of the register overall — so it is over-represented in this use.

Commercial means water for a business.

What happened to these permits

578 of the 2,402 permits decreed for commercial in El Paso County ended with a well the Division was told about — 24.1%. And 177 expired without one: 7.4%.

An expired permit is the trap in a rural sale. A seller can produce a permit that lapsed years ago, and a permit is not a water right — the two are separate, and a purchase turns on both. What an expired permit does and does not mean.

Buying land in El Paso County, or need a well drilled?

2,402 well permits are on the Division’s register in El Paso County, 177 of them expired. This site tells you what a permit says; it does not drill, and it is not advice on a water right. Tell us where and we pass the request to drillers and water-rights advisers working in Colorado.

We take no commission and we recommend no driller. We have no arrangement with any firm today — we are collecting these requests in order to go and find them. What we do with this.

The permits

Part of a bigger picture: all 46,491 permits in El Paso County, and every commercial permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Household Use Only — Gunnison 2,538
• Monitoring/sampling — Mesa 2,522
• Monitoring/sampling — Pueblo 2,493
• Irrigation — Kit Carson 2,480
• Irrigation — Saguache 2,476
• Irrigation — Rio Grande 2,407
• Stock — Weld 2,360
• Domestic — Summit 2,336
• Domestic — Pitkin 2,295
• Domestic — Mesa 2,287
• Domestic — Las Animas 2,270