Frustrated residents of a Denver, Colorado, suburb said that state law is forcing them to participate in a major oil and gas drilling project against their wishes, so they launched legal challenges with potentially significant consequences for the industry.
Backed by a federal judge, they have a chance this week to ask state regulators to block multiple wells planned within about 400m of homes in the city of Broomfield.
The dispute is a microcosm of a broader battle in Colorado, where burgeoning subdivisions overlap with rich oil and gas fields, bringing drilling rigs and homes uncomfortably close.
Photo: AP
The battle is playing out on multiple fronts. Broomfield residents are taking their case both to state regulators and federal court. In the legislature, majority Democrats are pushing legislation that would give the Broomfield residents and others like them powerful new weapons to keep drilling rigs away from their homes.
In Broomfield, about 32km north of downtown Denver, Extraction Oil and Gas wants to drill in open areas amid the Wildgrass neighborhood of roomy new homes.
A group called the Wildgrass Oil and Gas Committee said the wells are dangerously close to their homes, although they would be beyond the 150m setback required by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which regulates the industry.
They added that state laws are forcing residents who own the mineral rights under their property to lease or sell them to Extraction through a process called forced pooling.
It allows the oil and gas commissioners to require all the owners of nearby minerals to sell or lease them to an energy company in exchange for a share of the profits.
Created a century ago, forced pooling was designed to prevent the proliferation of oil derricks. Landowners were scrambling to drill their own wells to keep a neighbor’s well from grabbing their oil. Forced pooling allowed a single well to gather the oil and the income was distributed among the owners.
In Broomfield, some mineral owners are resisting.
“We did not have any interest in going into business with an oil and gas company,” said Lizzie Lario, a member of the Wildgrass group, who along with her husband owns the mineral rights under their home that would be included in the project.
She said she did not want to participate in something that could result in spills, fires and explosions so close to homes.
Many states have forced pooling laws, though some require a certain percentage of owners to consent before a pooled well can proceed.
Colorado allows forced pooling with the approval of a single party, provided they have the means to get the minerals out.
The Wildgrass committee said the oil and gas commission repeatedly delayed a hearing on their objections, so they filed suit, asking a federal judge to rule the forced pooling law unconstitutional.
The judge has not ruled on the lawsuit, but he ordered the commission to hold the long-delayed hearing. It is expected to take place today.
Wildgrass committee attorney Kate Merlin said that residents want the commission to deny the forced pooling application on the grounds that Extraction has not shown it is capable of developing the project in a way that is economically sustainable and that protects public safety.
Extraction spokesman Brian Cain said that the company met with Broomfield officials and a citizens task force more than 28 times over two years and adopted 95 percent of the task force’s recommendations.
The buffer zone around the well site is four times the state requirement, he said.
He called Extraction’s operating agreement with Broomfield “the gold standard in Colorado.”
Forced pooling is critical to the oil and gas industry in Colorado, said Scott Prestidge, a spokesman for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.
Without it, some wells would not be financially viable, he said.
Forced pooling combined with horizontal drilling — well bores that penetrate straight down, then bend outward laterally for thousands of meters — make it economical to drill in the oil field north of Denver, he said.
A single site with horizontal wells extending 3.2km can replace as many as 18 vertical wells, he said.
That makes it cheaper to operate and control pollution, and it reduces the amount of land and roads required.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS