Noelle Phillips for The Denver Post, my new weekend paper now that we are out of the Financial Times’ distribution zone: Colorado’s oil and gas regulators studied health problems tied to drilling. Critics ask: Why will nothing change?
The headline does not scream riveting reading, so before you click here is a short story about our family’s recent journey that may put it in context.
We moved to Colorado in great part for more space and an opportunity to spend more time outdoors. The small towns north and northwest of Denver, in Boulder Valley County, were particularly appealing: great schools, kind-of affordable houses — their proximity to billionaire-laden Boulder got them within striking distance of DC — close enough to the foothills that a trip in the mountains does not take a full day of planning yet far enough that mountain fires should not be as big of a concern. [Note: Here, too, a caveat. There has in fact been a major fire in the area, not from wood but rather acres of dry grass in the open spaces people here are so proud of. Can’t escape climate change. ] Also a quick, non-trafficjammed commute to my new place of work northeast of Denver. What’s not to love? In fact, every single person with whom we shared our great plans nodded in agreement and expressed the appropriate mix of pleasure and envy.
So that was where we hoped to settle initially and that was where our super-kind, super-accommodating realtor showed us on our first few tours. We even made an offer, which was — and I will foreshadow with a thankfully! here — outbid. Then we noticed that another property we looked at, and got within a couple of heartbeats of making an an offer, a property whose backyard looked into one of those open spaces Coloradans are so proud of, also had some heavy machinery in that open space, digging a hole wider than it was deep but unsettlingly large in both dimensions, yellow caution tape all around it. What’s that, I asked? Oh, it’s just an old oil well being decommissioned and the company doing it found contaminated soil, probably a leak from who knows when, so they are now digging around and testing until they’ve cleaned out all the contaminants — like a Mohs procedure — before they finally plug it. People make it out to be a bigger deal than it is. Probably why the price is so good! Anyway, you can read more about it online.
And so we did. And as we did, our great plans for a big move to the wide open spaces of Colorado began to unravel.
A thing about the state that may or may not be common knowledge but it was news to us: it is full of oil and gas. The Wattenberg Gas Field is one of the largest in the US and still being exploited. Go to Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission’s interactive map of wells, and you will see the striking density of them at Denver and Boulder’s doorsteps, and more wells than you’d expect in the city limits. For a great overview of the Colorado gas well situation check out a substack newsletter aptly named What the Frack?. Aptly, because 99% of Colorado’s oil and gas production comes from fracking.
In fact, a quick Internet search led us to the reason why that abandoned backyard oil well was being capped and, oops, found to have been contaminating the surrounding soil for who knows how long. There will soon be a whole lot of fracking underneath Boulder Valley, courtesy of the neighboring and significantly less crunchy Weld County, which gave a permit for some crafty oilmen to perform a real-life milkshake maneuver. The Draco Pad website described where in Weld County some 26 holes will be made. Tucked in a tiny thumbnail at the bottom of the page is a depiction of what will happen underground: one of the longest horizontal drilling operations ever attempted, going for 5 miles, well into Boulder Valley County and underneath many residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, etc.
Another well-named website, Erie Protectors, goes into much detail for why this is a Bad Thing Indeed, even not taking into account the fact that the wells themselves will be less than the mandatory 2,000 feet away from houses (which is kind of a big deal — why even have a state law if you won’t enforce it). An important observation they make, and the reason why those oilmen felt the obligation — or was it a mandate from the local government? — to plug the abandoned wells was that there will be a lot of pressurized liquid going through those bore holes, and who knows what may pop and when, plugged or not.
Oh, and did I mention the University of Colorado study from last year — available to us during all this searching and the reason why that Denver Post article exists — which noted increased risk of childhood leukemia for those living within 8 miles of a well? But then, it doesn’t take a rigorous scientific study to understand what my grandmother (or, in the absence of a grandmother, Nassim Taleb) could have told you: avoid living close to fume-spewing industries of any kind to avoid risks known and unknown.
If ever there was a reason for a hematologist/oncologist and a pulmonologist with four children, one of whom was still an infant, to give up on an area and settle for less space and no backyard in significantly more urban parts of Denver proper, well, this was it! There is another short story about how we finally found the right place, with a couple of detours on the way, but let’s leave that for another time.
You may now, if you haven’t already, click through and read the article, because it discusses the aftermath of those results coming out.
What happened after the study was what the oil industry, like the tobacco industry before it, loves. There was a committee. It reviewed that and 2 more studies and came to the tepid conclusion that more research needs to be done, and that no changes shall be made to Colorado’s drill permit process. You know, the same process that allowed 26 wells to be drilled less than 2,000 feet from people’s homes, then under more homes, schools, hospitals, etc, etc. To quote the Post, “oil and gas industry representatives welcomed the review, saying it is important for Colorado regulators to follow science.”
Yes, yes, of course. If the science can’t tell us which cigarette, nay, which puff of the cowboy killer caused your lung tumor, well then, can we even say that smoking causes cancer? Show us the atom of benzene that got into your child’s bone marrow to cause her leukemia and we will shut this plant down, the Colorado oilmen — those champions of science — might cry.
How did it come to this?
Well first of all, didn’t you hear how important fracking was? Just in the last few months Tyler Cowen, Ed Conway and The New York Times noted this, that last one putting an accent on the Democratic Party establishment not being too keen on fighting oil and gas anymore.
Second, so many of those schools being drilled under are paid for by oil and gas! This is as true in Colorado as it is in Texas although unlike the astroturfed Colorado data the local reporting from Amarillo, Texas gives more color on how fickle that funding can be.
Third, There Is No Alternative (↬ Cory Doctorow).
Fourth, we are all human and would rather not advertise anything nefarious going on that may decrease their property values even when they couldn’t do anything about it and take the brunt of the risk. Why, this oil well here is part of regular infrastructure, just like telephone poles and traffic lights, don’t you know?
Fifth, there was in fact huge uproar about most of these projects during the permitting phase — the above mentioned What the Frack? newsletter has written about some of it — but it has had no effect. As long as the 2,000 foot-ish setback was followed and the oilmen could say with a straight face that, as far as they knew, what they did had no ill effects on human health if all the safety procedures are followed, asterisk asterisk, the permits were granted.
Sixth, even if something bad did happen, some of these oilmen run fly-by operations that are worse than Washington DC residential construction LLCs. By the time a well is found to have done damage the company that drilled it is long gone and there is no one to sue. Why did you think there were so many abandoned wells out there?
In short, plenty of reasons, none of them good.
Reason number seven hits close to home. When Rio Tinto wanted to mine for lithium in western Serbia the country was in an uproar. Never mind that the EU is very much for establishing a wholly European-based battery supply chain. Never mind that the contracts with the government were already signed. Years have passed and there is still no mine. I suspect this is because Serbia is an already small and ever-shrinking country with limited resources. Screw up one river system with mining detritus and there aren’t that many more left to go around. Screw up each and every one, and you don’t have another country to go to.
Not so with Americans, who will always have Yellowstone and other national parks to keep in reserve. The country is so vast with so much unspoiled wilderness that there is the illusion of abundance. The problem with national parks of course is that they have no houses, schools, hospitals, or really anything that would qualify as residential infrastructure. Far from ideal for a family, and even singles may have trouble settling in unless they are the Ted Kaczynski and/or Waldenponding types. Look at where people actually want to live, and you will find issue after man-made issue, created by greedy bastards, allowed in part because people who should know better thought they could always go somewhere else after the check clears.
With greed again becoming good, I have a sinking feeling that most American cities already have — or are soon to get — their own version of this fracking problem.