Trucks rolling through Front Range communities thumping the ground in the hunt for oil and gas are riling some residents.
Seismic exploration so unnerved Aurora homeowners earlier this year that the city has imposed new permitting requirements on companies. State regulators also are looking at their own rules.
Colorado residents chafing at the rapidly expanding oil and gas operations along the Front Range are pressuring their local governments for protection from industrial light, noise, vibration and pollution within city limits.
But state officials insist they alone have the right to regulate how and where the industry does its drilling. State attorneys are fighting local governments that try to impose their own rules.
The oil and gas industry on Monday hit Longmont with a lawsuit to kill voters’ recent ban on fracking within city limits.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Association contends the ban is illegal because it denies mineral owners the right to develop their property and blocks operations that state laws allow.
Colorado regulators, industry reps and environmentalists on Monday dove into the details of creating a before-and-after groundwater testing system to better detect contamination and ease concerns about drilling.
“This is our attempt to get more buy-in, more acceptability for these activities where they haven’t happened yet,” said Mike King, state director of natural resources, also serving on the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
Oil and gas have contaminated groundwater in 17 percent of the 2,078 spills and slow releases that companies reported to state regulators over the past five years, state data show.
The damage is worse in Weld County, where 40 percent of spills reach groundwater, the data show.
Most of the spills are happening less than 30 feet underground — not in the deep well bores that carry drilling fluids into rock.
The increasingly common practice of disposing of oil and gas drilling wastewater by injecting it underground can trigger earthquakes, according to federal scientists who studied quakes since 1970 in Colorado and neighboring states.
A Longmont-area farmsteader irked about odor, noise and leaks from gas wells by his house — whose complaints drove state regulators to negotiate a $15,000 fine against Encana — marched back to the regulators Thursday demanding tougher punishment.
Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation commissioners agreed to let Rod Brueske make his case at a formal hearing in the coming weeks.
Longmont voters’ ban on oil and gas drilling in their city has ignited anti-fracking forces along Colorado’s Front Range — and pro-industry groups are pushing back.
Aurora, Commerce City, Denver, Fort Collins, Lafayette and Louisville residents on Monday were mobilizing to push for similar bans on drilling inside their towns
Colorado health authorities will not fully enforce new EPA rules designed to protect people from air pollution at oil and gas facilities.
The state’s Air Quality Control Commission voted instead for a partial adoption of the federal clean-air rules. They plan to hold public meetings next year to consider full implementation.
FAIRPLAY — The federal Bureau of Land Management is preparing to open South Park — metro Denver’s main water source — to oil and gas drilling.
But Aurora Water, local authorities and conservationists are pushing back, demanding careful planning before any land is leased.
A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
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