During Colorado’s ‘ozone season,’ children and adults alike stay indoors. Drilling wells near the suburbs could make it worse.
Published on July 26, 2024
By Jennifer Oldham
For more than half the days since May 31, a toxic haze has blurred the towering Rocky Mountains along the eastern Front Range, prompting Colorado health officials to warn residents to reduce time outdoors to avoid damage to their lungs.
The smog forced older adults to forgo walks, asthma sufferers to reach for inhalers and parents to keep toddlers inside. It also heightened concerns about what it might mean for 3 million people here if state regulators approve oil and gas proposals that call for scores of new wells. Emissions from energy industry operations and traffic are the main drivers of the nine-county metropolitan Denver region’s failure to meet federal air quality standards for the last two decades.
“I am completely dumbfounded!” Aldo Plascencia, an Aurora resident who lives near where hundreds of new wells would be drilled, wrote on a community Facebook page on July 11.
“When dropping my kids at school this morning, parents were being notified that all outdoor field trips were being canceled today due to high ozone activity,” he added. “Why would anyone in their right mind consider permitting fracking so close to schools and houses — this will make matters worse.”
A decision on a 156-well Lowry Ranch proposal is imminent — state regulators have scheduled a hearing for July 30. Drilling would occur along the southeastern edge of greater Denver, under homes, a reservoir that holds the region’s drinking water and adjacent to one of the nation’s most polluted Superfund sites.
The 50-square-mile site is also near air monitors that recorded some of the region’s worst air pollution levels from 2019 to 2022. In the first 10 years of operation alone, the Lowry Ranch project would emit hundreds of tons of smog-forming compounds per year, as well as tens of thousands of tons of climate warming gases, according to Geosyntec, a consultant hired by Crestone Peak Resources, the operator proposing the plan. The wells could be in operation for 25 years.
Cities along the eastern flank of the Rockies already rank among the worst in the nation for lung-damaging ozone pollution, according to the American Lung Association’s 2023 “State of the Air” report. Denver was ranked sixth worst, with every county in the area receiving a failing grade. Pollution is so bad some days that a monitor at Rocky Mountain National Park registers levels that violate Environmental Protection Agency standards.
Greater Denver’s topography, which traps pollutants, contributes to the intractable problem, as does human-caused climate change. Global warming made June’s record hot conditions — the second warmest since 1872 — “more likely,” according to Climate Central, an organization that uses data and science to link weather-related events to global warming.
Colorado’s most densely populated area overlaps with some of the nation’s most profitable oil and gas fields — amplifying the health risk. The state tied with Alaska as the country’s fourth-largest oil producer and ranked as its eighth-biggest gas producer.
Vehicles and oil and gas operations emit nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which react when heated by the region’s plentiful sunlight to create ground-level ozone. In the month after this year’s annual “ozone season” began May 31, health officials issued more air quality alerts than in any similar period since 2016.
“We are having a difficult year,” Mike Silverstein, executive director of the Regional Air Quality Council, said at an online planning forum on July 18. The council advises state regulators on strategies to curb pollutants.
“We are exceeding the ozone standards at most of our monitoring stations,” he added, and “we are midway through ozone season.”
According to estimates used by the council, by 2026, emissions from oil and gas operations will comprise about 36% of the 253 tons per day of volatile organic compounds released in the region’s atmosphere. The second highest emitting category will be vehicles at 11%.
The industry is expected to account for 47% of the 144.5 tons of nitrogen oxide emitted per day in 2026 — more than three-and-a-half times as much as power plants and other large permitted facilities that pollute combined, according to the models used. It’s not possible, however, to draw a straight line from these percentages to the proportion of the region’s ozone pollution created by oil and gas extraction, David Sabados, the air quality council’s communications director, said in an email.
Because of where oil and gas “operations are located, as well as specifics of the types of volatile organic compounds that come out of drilling,” he wrote, “it’s estimated that cars are nearly as responsible for ozone creation as oil and gas.”
Regardless of what causes them, the emissions can be deadly. Air pollution from fossil fuel production in the U.S. in 2016 resulted in 7,500 excess deaths, 410,000 asthma incidents and 2,200 new cases of childhood asthma, with $77 billion in total health impacts, scientists found in a 2023 study published in Environmental Research: Health.
States with high oil and gas related emissions but lower population, such as Colorado and New Mexico, “have the highest impacts per million people,” scientists found.
“If you take any region that has a lot of people and put an air pollution source in it, all evidence points toward you would expect health impacts,” Jonathan Buonocore, the study’s lead author and an assistant environmental health professor at Boston University, told Capital & Main.
Crestone Peak Resources, the company proposing the 156-well project near suburban Aurora, said in documents filed with the Energy & Carbon Management Commission that it planned to mitigate emissions by electrifying drill rigs, among other strategies, so its operations would create “no adverse health risks to nearby communities, including sensitive individuals.”
To date, areas to the south and east of the Denver metropolitan area have seen little oil and gas development, compared to the state’s largest fossil fuel field north of the city. That could be about to dramatically change. A Capital & Main/FracTracker Alliance investigation found that the Lowry Ranch project, and a nearby 20-well plan proposed by GMT Exploration Company, LLC, could, if approved, result in about 229 wells being drilled near Aurora, the state’s third largest city.
A total of 56 wells are planned within one mile of the Aurora Reservoir, a major source of drinking water, the investigation found. About 125,000 people live within five miles of the proposed projects, the analysis showed.
These projects represent an expansion of fossil fuel production from Weld and Broomfield counties, to the north, looping around Denver’s eastern edge, where drilling will take place just yards from dense suburbs, an interactive map created using existing well locations, pending and approved permits and drilling proposals kept by the Energy & Carbon Management Commission found.
“What is happening in Aurora now is similar to what is happening in Broomfield and the fight that the community there has had to put up against oil and gas development,” said Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker’s Western program director, who created the interactive map. “They’ve had multiwell pads come right up to their community — this looks like the future of Aurora as well.”
The Lowry Ranch and GMT proposals include multiwell pads that would concentrate up to 72 wells on three locations on the outskirts of suburban neighborhoods. More homes are planned south of oil and gas sites that operators dubbed State Long, Beaver and Secret Stash. At least 52 of these wells would be drilled within a mile of residences.
A 45-minute drive to the northwest, Broomfield residents living within a mile of such multiwell pads more frequently reported upper respiratory symptoms, nosebleeds, nausea and shortness of breath than those living two miles from such sites, a study published in 2023 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found.
Health effects occurred despite pollution-curbing mitigation measures laid out by Civitas Resources, which owns Crestone Peak — the operator proposing the Lowry Ranch project, wrote Broomfield Mayor Guyleen Castriotta and City Councilmembers Laurie Anderson and Jean Lim to the Energy & Carbon Management Commission. Such mitigation tactics are similar to the methods listed in the firm’s multiwell plan near Aurora.
Indeed, the commission’s director cited such strategies in her recommendation that the six-member commission approve the Lowry Ranch project.
“Crestone has also committed to multiple best management practices to avoid, mitigate or minimize impacts to air quality,” wrote Julie Murphy, the Energy & Carbon Management Commission’s director. Such efforts include using electric-powered drill rigs, if possible, vapor recovery units on tanks and air quality monitoring on site, she said. The operator also committed to building a pipeline that will ferry away fossil fuels, reducing truck trips, she added.
The company now “has certainty regarding planned power generation during the drilling phase — at least four of the original twelve pads will be drilled on utility power,” wrote executives in a presentation they plan to give state regulators at the July 30 hearing. “We have updated (eliminated) those on-pad emissions.”
Along the Rockies Front Range, new air quality regulations implemented in the last decade have decreased overall emissions from oil and gas operations, even as drilling increased.
“A new hydrocarbon well today creates fewer emissions than it would have if it was put in 15 years ago, when there were far fewer emissions controls,” said Sabados, the regional air council communications director.
Such controls are among more than 30 rules state regulators developed in the last decade — measures detailed by the Colorado Oil & Gas Association in a presentation to state legislators in September.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment also requires energy operators to minimize emissions from fossil fuel storage tanks and to reduce methane releases from equipment — which limits the emission of volatile organic compounds that accompany the climate-warming gas. Regulators are also working to meet new mandates that require a reduction in summer nitrogen oxide pollution from the oil and gas industry by at least 30% in 2025 and 50% in 2030 in the Denver metro region.
“Air quality is continuing to improve,” Michael Ogletree, director of the state’s Air Pollution Control Division, said in an interview. “It may not look like that when you look at the number of Ozone Action Alert days, but that is because the national standard continues to change.”
As it collected scientific data illuminating the health hazards of ground-level ozone, the EPA reduced its standard for the pollutant three times to 0.07 parts per million in 2015 from 0.12 parts per million in 1979.
Meanwhile, residents from across the Front Range told regulators July 15 in an online hearing on the Lowry Ranch drilling proposal that they feared for their ability to do things outdoors in the summer if the proposal were approved.
“I have no choice to go outside on a high ozone day unless I want my vegetable garden to die,” testified Heidi Leathwood, climate policy analyst for 350 Colorado, an environmental nonprofit. “Global warming is an emergency. We cannot go on pretending it’s not — new projects should not be started.”
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