Cotter Corp. is preparing to brew a multimillion-gallon uranium cocktail in a mine shaft west of Denver — an innovation aimed at ending a threat to city water supplies.
If all goes well, mixing molasses and alcohol into a stream of filtered water pumped from the mine and discharged down Ralston Creek, and then re-injecting that mix into Cotter’s 2,000-foot-deep Schwartzwalder mine, will immobilize uranium tainting the creek.
An underground plume of toxic hydrocarbons from an oil spill north of the Colorado River near Parachute has been spreading for 10 days, threatening to contaminate spring runoff.
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.
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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