As summer drags on, so does the seemingly endless attempt to reform Colorado’s oil and gas permitting system. This was supposed to be a year of reform. Last year, the Colorado State Legislature passed two key pieces of legislation, Senate Bill 181 and House Bill 1261, which together laid the foundation for state regulatory agencies to vastly improve the rules governing the production of oil and gas. Specifically, SB-181 SB 181 fundamentally changed the mission of the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) to put the health and safety of Coloradans and their environment above the profits of corporations, and HB -1261 mandates the Air Quality Control Commission (AQCC) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% of 2005 levels by 2050. These legislative directives triggered a massive wave of rulemaking which both agencies planned their year around.

Then COVID-19 struck.

As state lawmakers scrambled to mitigate the worst of the crisis, the political momentum that had been driving environmental policy all but vanished. It quickly became clear that the pandemic would result in substantial losses of revenue not only for state and local governments, but also the oil and gas industry as consumers chose to drive less, and the economy violently contracted. Like the private sector, the COGCC and the AQCC had to navigate a new paradigm of social distancing, moving meetings to Zoom and negotiating novel methods of conducting the public’s business. The rulemaking agenda has been delayed by months.
However, this month, after almost a year of work by our Alliance’s Oil and Gas Committee, the Grand Valley Citizen’s Alliance and the Battlement Concerned Citizens, the “mother of all rulemakings” for the COGCC is finally set to beginning on August 24 and conclude in early October through a series of two hearings happening almost every week.

Throughout these weeks, Alliance members and residents impacted by oil and gas development from across the state will be united in front of the COGCC to demand that all of the rules must reflect the agency’s new mission to protect health and safety first in the permitting process. We will be tackling issues ranging from setback distances, to the legal standing of impacted homeowners to challenge permits, to water quality protections and many dozens more that our Alliance has been working to achieve for literally decades.

Air Quality Victory & More Work Ahead

And if that were not enough, the AQCC is simultaneously gearing up for another set of rulemakings aimed at reducing methane and toxic air emissions from oil and gas facilities. These rulemakings will build off the victory we won in 2019 that expanded leak detection and repair (LDAR) rates across the state and specifically mandated more inspections of facilities built within 1,000’ of schools and playgrounds. The new rulemaking will build upon these common sense protections by mandating continuous monitoring of oil and gas facilities for dangerous emission leaks, insure that waste injection facilities are also included in the LDAR rules, and limit NOx emissions from gas-burning engines that power oil and gas operations.

While the AQCC and our Alliance prepare for these new rulemakings, a coalition of local governments from Western Colorado and the Eastern Plains, are spending big to repeal these rules. Garfield County is bankrolling the effort, spending $1.5 million of public money to pay for fancy lawyers in Denver to both challenge the existing rules and the new proposals. Weld and Garfield County even filed suit to stop the new air quality protections from going into effect.

Thankfully, this repeal effort was dealt a blow when a Denver District Court threw out Weld County’s case, saying they lacked the standing and authority to challenge the rules in the first place. This is great news for our Alliance and impacted residents from across the state as the court’s decision allows the new air quality protections to take effect statewide.

Orphaned Wells, Looming Crisis

While state regulators continue their slow walk toward fulfilling their legislative mandate, oil and gas interests have been hard at work to oppose the efforts. Yet even as they scheme to undermine basic reform designed to protect people and our planet, many oil and gas operators are on the verge of collapse due to heavy debts, shifty accounting, and a fundamental mismanagement of their financial resources. This is a disaster for taxpayers, who will have to foot the bill to clean up hundreds of drilling sites across the state should these companies declare bankruptcy.

In order to begin production, companies are required to post a bond—money that the government holds until wells are plugged after extraction is completed. Unfortunately, both in Colorado and throughout the United States, bonding requirements are woefully inadequate to compensate for the immense cost of reclaiming wells. Should an operator fold, the wells that they managed are all too frequently left unplugged to spew poisonous greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and pollute any groundwater when the wellbore pipe that is no longer being maintained inevitably erodes.

Seeing this predicament as an opportunity to fleece taxpayers, industry executives have shamelessly solicited bailouts from the federal government, using the present economic conditions and their self-inflicted financial distress as an excuse to demand billions of dollars in the form of federal subsidies. In Colorado, operators and the local governments which they’ve commandeered claim that now is not the time for
regulations which would put more pressure on the oil and gas industry; they say measures like keeping drilling away from homes and continuously monitoring for gas leaks are simply too expensive.

Of course, we know better. We know that public health and safety can’t wait, that we need to curb greenhouse gas emissions now and that the oil and gas industry needs to be responsible for cleaning up its own mess. We know that we cannot wait for an ideal time to regulate the oil and gas industry.

Fortunately, our Alliance has refused to wait. Every day, our members are working to ensure that the rules envisioned under SB-181 and HB-1261 come to fruition. Despite all that has happened, 2020 is still a year of reform and the changes we have worked so hard to achieve are within reach. Together we will work for a healthy, just and self-reliant future for Western Colorado.