AbstractEulerian–Langrangian localized adjoint methods (ELLAM) were developed to solve convection–diffusion–reaction equations governing contaminant transport in groundwater flowing through a porous medium, subject to various combinations of boundary conditions. In this article, we prove optimal‐order error estimates and some superconvergence results for the ELLAM schemes. In contrast to many existing estimates for a variety of numerical methods, which often contain the temporal derivatives of the exact solution, our error estimates contain the total derivatives of the exact solution but do not involve any temporal derivatives of the exact solution. © 1995 John Wiley&S