After 18 months of cleanup around Suncor’s oil refinery, contamination of the South Platte River is diminishing, but concentrations of cancer-causing benzene in the water remain six times higher than the national safety standard.
An unprecedented post-Thanksgiving wildfire that burned through snow, frustrating firefighters as ponds froze and ice coated helicopters, has revitalized forests and meadows in Rocky Mountain National Park.
GREELEY — For the first time in decades, residents of industry-friendly Greeley are fighting to keep oil and gas wells away from their homes.
While Colorado’s drilling boom produces record amounts of gas and oil, the multiplying wells also are bringing up far greater quantities of a salty, toxic liquid waste — 15 billion gallons a year.
If cleaned properly, all that liquid could become safe water to restore rivers, irrigate food crops and sustain communities in an era of drought and declining water supplies. Or at least it could be reused by oil and gas companies to reduce their draw of fresh water from farmers and cities.
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.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday proposed federal protection for wolverines imperiled by climate change — by nurturing survivors in the southern Rocky Mountains, including Colorado.
Wolverines need heavy late-season snow to form dens and to cache food, and the latest science finds that warming will cause 63 percent of habitat suitable for wolverines — mostly on federal land — to vanish by 2085. Colorado high country offers a refuge with snow.
A project that could pump enough water from underground aquifers to serve 100,000 more people along Colorado’s Front Range is moving ahead — even as communities pledge to reduce dependence on such finite sources of water.
Two test wells drilled deep beneath Douglas County-owned open space, between Denver and Colorado Springs, found abundant water and good pressure, consistent with 1995 estimates by the state engineer. Permanent facilities — including pump stations — are being installed so that the aquifers can be tapped.
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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