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.
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 snow-covered tailings heap on Boreas Pass leaks toxic cadmium and zinc, deadly for fish, into creeks that flow down through Breckenridge and, eventually, into Denver’s Dillon Reservoir.
This mining mess from a century ago sat largely ignored until Friday, when national, state and local authorities trudged in and eyed it as a potential demonstration project to jumpstart cleanups of thousands of festering mines around Colorado and the West.
A hotter, drier climate is worsening the imbalance between water supply and rising demand in seven Western states where 40 million people depend on the Colorado River, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Wednesday after completion of a three-year study.
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.
BUCKEYE — The scorching of Colorado forests by super-intense wildfires is worsening the water woes for Eldon Ackerman and other Larimer County farmers, jeopardizing thousands of irrigated acres that normally produce millions of dollars in crops.
Importing water from the Missouri River to Colorado’s semi-arid Front Range has emerged as an option western states are considering to deal with increasing overuse of the Colorado River.
That diversion is listed as a long-term possibility after review of more than 100 sometimes far-fetched ideas submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Among them: “Towing an iceberg wrapped in some type of plastic to California and capturing the meltwater”; tapping the Mississippi River; and “filling large nylon water bags” in Alaska for distribution down south.
Bureau of Reclamation officials on Tuesday said the “Missouri River Reuse Project” will be evaluated for feasibility following the release in coming weeks of a federal government study on water supply for the West.
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.
A western Colorado water district is fighting for rights to divert and store huge amounts of water from the White River — enough to sustain a large city — for uses that include oil shale industrial development.
Colorado’s Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments by the Yellow Jacket Water Conservancy District, which is challenging a state water court’s decision rejecting its rights to 140,000 acre-feet of water from the river — water that otherwise would flow into the Green and Colorado rivers.
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.
Learn more... 