Thirty Colorado environmental groups wrote an open letter to Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) this week, asking him to publicly oppose a plan to drill 166 oil and gas wells near Aurora communities. Energy company Civitas Resources wants to use hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to extract oil and gas from underground shale formations beneath 32,000 acres of State Land Board property.
Civitas submitted its proposal, known as the Lowry Ranch Comprehensive Area Plan (CAP), to the state’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission in January. The proposed area is in an EPA-designated severe ozone nonattainment area, meaning that the area already exceeds the government limit for one or more pollutants. The CAP is currently under final review by the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC).
The letter, which is signed by groups including Colorado Rising and Colorado Coalition for Liveable Climate, criticizes the CAP on several fronts, pointing to public opposition of the proposition, risk of exacerbating environmental issues, and Colorado’s commitment to climate justice. The letter says that the proposal would not only be a health and safety concern to nearby communities, but that it could also be a threat to the well-being of wildlife in the area.
“Coloradans who stand to be the most impacted have pleaded for denial of the CAP to protect themselves from the increased exposure to hazardous air pollutants including ozone, nitrogen oxides (NOx), PM2.5, benzene, and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and to the risk of spills, fires, explosions, and water contamination that would inevitably accompany this large scale drilling and fracking proposal,” the letter reads.
One Aurora resident, Conrad Huygen, a retired Air Force judge advocate and former Deputy Chief of the Defender Services Office in the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, sent a letter to the ECMC detailing many of the environmental and economic dangers of the proposal, from home insurance premium increases to a decrease in the bird population. Notably, Huygen mentioned an increased risk of seismic activity and wildfires in the Front Range that could result from the fracking project.
“The U.S. Geological Survey confirms both fracking itself and wastewater disposal
each can induce earthquakes,” Huygen writes. “Incredibly, the CAP fails to address or even mention earthquakes, tremblors, or seismicity risks of any kind. As with wildfire risks, this omission alone provides sufficient grounds to disapprove the CAP.”
The final public hearing on the CAP is being held by the ECMC on Friday, August 2.
