Colorado’s oil and gas wars broke more than two decades ago as the industry and local communities found themselves at loggerheads over the race to pull fossil fuels from lands stretching from the Utah border to the Kansas state line.
Twenty years on it looks like the battle still has legs.
The most recent skirmish broke out in March when Conservation Colorado filed four ballot measures aimed at tightening oil and gas operators’ liability for damages and cleanup of contaminated groundwater.
The volley was in response to a “right to natural gas” ballot measure by Advance Colorado, which describes itself as an organization focused on “reversing radical policies that are harming the state.”
The scrap upended a delicate armistice negotiated in 2024 by Gov. Jared Polis to defuse then warring ballot measures.
This spring’s row is, however, only the most recent twist in the long running battle between environmentalists and communities who want to see drilling gone, or at least gone far away, and the industry, which maintains it has the nation’s cleanest and most regulated operations for a resource used every day.
Advance Colorado’s Initiative 177 would enshrine in the state constitution the right of consumers to purchase natural gas for cooking and heating and the right for producers to sell it.
“We and the other parties have an agreement and have honored it, but if Advance Colorado wants to play in this space, if they break it, they own it,” said Kelly Nordini, Conservation Colorado’s chief executive. “If Advance Colorado’s initiative goes away, so do ours.”
This leaves the oil and gas industry representatives who negotiated the agreement frustrated.
“We remain committed to the agreement brokered by Governor Polis, which is still intact,” said Dan Haley, executive director of Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development, an industry group known as CRED.
The industry does not support the Advance Colorado ballot measure and has no direct relationship with the group, Haley said.
Michael Fields, president of Advance Colorado Institute — the group’s policy arm — declined to comment. Advance Colorado has until June 25 to submit signatures to get the measure on the November ballot.
And so, despite decades of lawmaking, rulemaking, negotiation and collaboration, the underlying tensions remain, tensions that began two decades ago with a boom — a natural gas drilling boom in the Western Slope’s Piceance Basin.
“It was like an invasion,” said Matt Sura, who was then a community organizer for the Western Colorado Alliance, a grassroots consumer and environment advocacy group
On either side of Interstate 70 through the Grand Valley, for more than 30 miles, there were drilling rigs lit up like Christmas trees, with one company’s rigs flying the pirate Jolly Roger, Sura said. Ribbons of flame from flaring licked the sky
Garfield County was the most heavily drilled county in the West in 2008, with 3,181 “rig weeks,” equal to a drill rig running for a week. That was 40% more than the next most active area, Sublette County, Wyoming, according to an Headwater Economics study.
The influx of oil field workers drove up real estate prices and housing became hard to come by. Trailer complexes, known as man camps, sprang up. This rural swatch of Colorado suffered traffic jams and streams of trucks beat up the roads.
“Things were going so fast and furious, mistakes were being made, and we didn’t have a state agency that was equipped with either the rules or the staff,” Sura said.
It was into this maelstrom that Bill Ritter ran a successful campaign for governor in 2006. Having heard the concerns and complaints of Western Slope voters, the new governor set about overhauling the state’s oil and gas regulations, last updated in 1994.
It was a marathon of rulemaking stretching over 18 months. And in December 2008, 177 pages of new rules were adopted. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversaw the industry, was overhauled and staff was added.
Among the new rules was a 350-foot setback for drilling rigs from homes in developed areas. The setback had been 150 feet, a distance that ensured if a rig tipped over it would not hit the house.
That, however, was only the beginning.
“The rules are an improvement, but there are gaps, and as drilling increases in suburban areas, those gaps are going to become more visible,” Mike Freeman, an attorney with Earthjustice, a nonprofit public interest law firm, predicted at the time.
Meg Collins, then president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, or COGA, called the rules “a pie in the face” to the industry. In January 2009, COGA filed a lawsuit in Denver District Court challenging the new regulations.
True to Freeman’s prophecy, the development of hydrofracturing, or fracking, and horizontal drilling enabled oil and gas to be freed from the tight shale formations beneath the Front Range.
And by 2010, the industry was moving from the Northwest Colorado’s Piceance Basin to the Front Ranges’s Denver-Julesburg Basin, which stretches from north of Colorado Springs to the Wyoming border.
Now drilling was sometimes cheek by jowl with suburban development. The uproar was quick in coming.
Homes are visible on a hill beyond Nickel Road Operating’s Blehm Pad oil and gas development site west of Ault on Wednesday, May 19, 2021. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)Cities enter the fray
In 2012, Longmont adopted a drilling moratorium and rules banning fracking in residential areas. COGA sued and then-Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration joined the industry, arguing the state had primacy over oil and gas regulation.
Still, Fort Collins, Boulder County and Broomfield, among others,imposed drilling moratoriums.
Grassroots groups formed, including Broomfield Clean Air and Water, Erie Rising, Adams County Communities for Drilling Accountability Now, Weld Air and Water, Citizens for a Healthy Fort Collins, and the League of Oil Impacted Coloradans.
City council and county commission meetings were flooded with concerned, and sometimes angry, citizens.
At a packed Erie town board meeting considering a drilling moratorium, one resident addressed the trustees wearing a gas mask and a lawyer representing COGA raised the prospect of a lawsuit.
“I’m willing to be sued by the state or whoever,” Erie Mayor Tina Harris, a middle school teacher, said in response to the COGA threat. “I want the state to hear loud and clear, I am not going to be threatened into not doing something.”
One instrument, pioneered by Erie, was the “memorandum of understanding” in which a driller agreed to take specified protective measures in exchange for local approval.
A Broomfield City Council meeting to approve a memorandum — after a court had struck down its drilling moratorium — ran seven and a half hours, well past midnight.
“We packed the entire council chamber, the whole entire atrium, all the courtrooms in the basement with people watching on TVs,” said Laurie Anderson, then a leader of Broomfield Clean Air and Water and now a city councilperson. “There were several hundred people there just saying, ‘No, don’t do this.’”
With few other options, the council approved the memorandum. Indeed, local officials were stymied as the state, citing a 1992 state Supreme Court decision, told them they had limited power over the industry.
“As public officials, we have the power to keep all industrial activities away from residential areas — except for drilling,” Gerry Horak, a Fort Collins city councilmember in 2013, said at the time. “It’s frustrating.”
The battle was heightened by the fact that the Front Range was facing not only a drilling boom but a suburban housing boom, placing homes and drill sites in competition for land.
The fight turned to the legislature, where year after year barrages of dueling oil and gas bills were filed.
On one side: The Operator Liable for Oil and Gas Operations bill and the Affirm Local Government Siting Authority bill.
On the other side: the Recognize Importance Oil Gas Industry and Local Government Liable Fracking Ban Oil And Gas Moratorium bills.
The legislature, however, was gridlocked with the Democrats holding the House and the Republicans controlling the Senate.
“I ran a number of bills during those years, and all but one of them passed the House, but none of them passed the Senate,” said Michael Foote, a former Democratic state representative from Lafayette. “But I think they did a good job of bringing the issue up and really honing arguments and building public support.”
“Oil and gas do so much with severance tax dollars,” countered Perry Buck, who was a Republican Weld County representative and is now a Weld County Commissioner. “It pays for water projects, it pays for DOLA (Department of Local Affairs) grants, and for water treatment plants for municipalities. The oil and gas industry is important to the economy.”
Industry adopts new measures
At the same time, the industry was changing on its own, trying to address concerns with new technology and methods, including using pipelines and central facilities to cut down on tanks and truck traffic, decreasing the time it took to drill a well, adding high sound walls and onsite air monitoring.
The industry had also moved from confrontation to collaboration. Colorado became the first state with fracking fluid disclosure rules and groundwater testing rules after negotiations between environmental groups and the industry.
“All of those were happening way ahead of things happening in the country,” said Haley, who was then president of COGA. “We have been willing to come to the table. And when at the table … you can come to an agreement that works for everybody.”
COGA dropped its lawsuit over the regulations. The days of the Jolly Roger and “pie in the face” were gone — but wells were still being drilled near homes and schools.
Impatient with the session-after-session legislative skirmishes, oil and gas opponents took to the ballot box in 2014.
One initiative would have required drilling rigs to be set back 2,000 feet from homes. Another would have added an environmental bill of rights to the state constitution.
Both measures were supported by the environmental community and were backed politically and financially by Jared Polis, then representing the 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House.
The industry countered with two ballot measures: one that would have withheld state oil and gas revenue from communities banning drilling and a second requiring a fiscal impact note for all initiatives.
Business and industry groups raised $9.2 million to oppose the environmentalists’ ballot measures and Coloradans for Safe and Clean Energy, supported by Polis, had a $2.2 million war chest.
It was shaping up to be the most expensive ballot battle in the state’s history.
“It would have been scorched earth,” predicted Pat Hamill, president of Oakwood Homes and chairman of Colorado Concern, one of the initiative industry groups.
Hickenlooper stepped in and negotiated the first oil and gas truce. Each side agreed to withdraw their initiatives and the governor appointed a 21-member commission to make recommendations to the legislature on ways to minimize land use conflicts over oil and gas.
“The dynamic was between local governments wanting to regulate the surface and the state wanting to regulate down-hole and ensure fostering of the development of oil and gas,” said panelist Jeff Robbins, an attorney representing local governments — including Lafayette, Aurora, and Adams County — on oil and gas issues. “So, the task force was developed to see if they could come up with answers to the conundrum.”
It didn’t.
“It was designed to fail,” said Sura, who by then was an attorney representing Front Range communities and homeowners on oil and gas issues and was also on the panel.
A recommendation needed a two-thirds vote, but the oil and gas industry and other economic interests, such as homebuilders and agriculture, together held veto power
The final recommendations called for more local input and additional oil and gas inspectors, but no local control. The local control recommendations were in a minority report that presaged things to come.
“The oil and gas industry proved they weren’t interested in a compromise or solving the problem,” Polis said in a statement after the report was issued.
And so, Hickenlooper’s compromise ended one war, but not all wars.
Conflict shifts to new front
Battle lines were drawn again at the ballot box in 2018. Colorado Rising, a coalition of environmental and community groups, sponsored Initiative 112 that would have required a 2,500-foot setback from homes for drill rigs. The buffer had already been increased to 500 feet in state rules.
Industry forces countered with a measure that would have placed in the state constitution the right of property owners to seek damages for any diminution of property value caused by government action.
Both were defeated. The setback measure failed with 57% opposed and 43% in support. The property rights measure garnered 54% of the votes but since it was seeking to be added to the state constitution it needed 55%.
The oil and gas industry spent an estimated $40 million to defeat Initiative 112, which it argued amounted to a ban on drilling in much of Colorado.
“We came together as a state,” said Weld County’s Buck. “We were going to protect our oil and gas, and it was a monumental ballot issue where people who wanted those oil and gas jobs, people in agriculture who needed the added income for their mineral rights, came together
“It was a heavy lift,” Buck added. “It was a huge statement.”
We came together as a state. We were going to protect our oil and gas … It was a huge statement.
— Perry Buck, Weld County Commissioner
Still, the setback measure received 825,000 favorable votes and that same ballot put Democrats in control of both houses of the legislature and made Jared Polis the governor-elect. The stage was set for a pivotal donnybrook.
The vessel for all the ribbon commission recommendations not made and all the stalled legislation of previous years was Senate Bill 181.
It aimed to give local governments more control and reorient state rules from promoting the efficient development of oil and gas to regulating it to protect public health, safety, welfare, wildlife and the environment.
It was one of the most hotly contested and heavily lobbied bills of the 2019 session. One hearing ran till 2 a.m. with 180 people testifying.
“It was definitely a contentious process,” said Foote, who was a co-sponsor of the bill. “It was heavily opposed.”
The bill passed on Democratic votes. All the Republicans and a few Democrats in competitive districts voted against it.
Weld County’s Buck said “the legislature turned around and said, ‘Oh, forget that ballot initiative victory. We’re going to try to shut down oil and gas.’”
In signing the bill, Polis declared the oil and gas wars over.
Senate Bill 181 directed the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and the Air Quality Control Commission to revise their rules. It also reconstituted the oil and gas commission, reducing industry representation.
“It was a game changer,” said Robbins, who was the interim director of the oil and gas commission and had a hand in writing the bill. “It changed the (commission’s) mission … and changed a lot of priorities and kicked off this marathon rulemaking.”
Between 2020 and 2025, the oil and gas commission, which was renamed the Energy and Carbon Management Commission in 2023, had 11 major rulemakings on issues ranging from well integrity to the financial condition of operators.
One rule extended the setback between drill sites and homes to 2,000 feet.
Robbins said that they enacted all those regulations without “any litigation challenge to the efficacy of the rules … That is remarkable.”
At the state Air Quality Control Commission there were 15 key rulemakings, including first-in-the nation methane reduction rule based on operator performance and a first-in-the-nation rule clamping down on pollution-emitting equipment called controllers.
Pneumatic controllers are used to manage manage temperatures, pressure and liquid levels at oil and gas facilities and drill pads of all sizes. The controllers run on natural gas from the well itself and every time they open and close a valve or other mechanism, they release a little bit of gas. (Dana Coffield, The Colorado Sun)The first controller rules were also negotiated and COGA and the Environmental Defense Fund issued a joint release praising them.
The rules have made it more cumbersome and costly for the industry to operate in Colorado and operators are left wondering what’s coming next, said Lynn Granger, the current president of COGA.
“This industry just needs a chance to catch its breath and operate under this new structure,” Granger said. “But again, we see bills that are being pushed by folks that just simply don’t want us to operate here, and that’s the goal.”
As if to prove the point, in 2020, a coalition of environmental groups proposed more ballot initiatives, including a 2,500-foot setback, and the industry responded with a right to natural gas and fiscal note initiatives.
Now it was Polis who played the role of peacemaker, getting the industry to withdraw its initiatives in exchange for agreements from legislators to pause new oil and gas bills and from environmental groups to stand down.
Still, in 2022 Polis had to put down another ballot flap.
Then in 2024 an environmental coalition proposed a ballot measure to end Colorado oil and gas permitting by 2030 and another group, led by Conservation Colorado, filed three measures including ones to hold oil and gas companies strictly liable for damages and create a private right of action to enforce environmental regulations.
“Even with new rules, oil and gas is a major cause of pollution in our state, we don’t see pollution going down,” Heidi Leathwood, climate policy analyst for 350 Colorado, one of the environmental groups said. “We can’t keep drilling an average of 1,000 wells a year.”
Compounding the pressure on the industry were bills in the legislature aimed to reduce ozone pollution, including one that would pause oil and gas drilling in summer months.
Oil and gas operations account for about 45% of the Front Range emissions of nitrogen oxides and 41% of volatile organic compounds — the two ingredients of ozone, according to a University of Colorado study.
The industry countered once more with an “energy choice” ballot measure to safeguard natural gas.
It was up to Polis to talk everyone down, and he came up with a compromise under which the ozone legislation and ballot measures would go away and the industry would pay a fee for each barrel of oil produced.
By one estimate, the fee could raise about $138 million a year which would go to transportation and public lands projects, as well as capping old oil and gas wells.
“In coming together, this diverse group agreed that costly, divisive ballot measures and legislation are not in the interest of the state,” Polis said in announcing the deal.
But is the conflict really over?
Yet here we are again with Advance Colorado proposing another right to natural gas measure and Conservation Colorado with initiatives to hold operators liable for damages to air, land and water and prevent existing homeowners from being charged by a utility for extensions of the natural gas system.
On May 7, Polis gathered Conservation Colorado’s Nordini and the industry’s Haley to together announce a “renewed commitment to the agreement reached in 2024 to avoid costly and divisive ballot measures.”
“Now is not the time to play politics with energy in Colorado, ” Nordini said.
Haley agreed: “We oppose any energy-related ballot measure in 2026.”
Still, as long as Advance Colorado’s initiative remains in play, so will those of Conservation Colorado’s, Nordini said.
Now is not the time to play politics with energy in Colorado.
— Kelly Nordini, Conservation Colorado
While all this was going on, the new rules are proving “a new level of protection and oversight,” Robbins, the energy commission’s chairman, said. “We’re now at a place where we probably have the most comprehensive rules on oil and gas activity in the country.”
Some local governments, including Broomfield and Adams County, have also used the local control grant by the the law to develop their own regulations, oil and gas departments and inspectors.
Both Foote, who is also an attorney, and Sura have represented local governments and residents before the energy commission. They say things have improved and despite the predictions of its demise, the industry is still around.
“They are still able to access all of the resources that are in Colorado, and it only means that they are doing it in a way that isn’t going to harm the people and the environment,” Sura said.
And yet, the anxiety remains that the rules still aren’t protective enough. Robbins has said: “If you tick all the boxes, if you meet our robust regulatory regime, you’re deserving of a permit approval.”
Foote has countered: “Just because an operator checks all the boxes doesn’t mean that is sufficiently protective.”
The argument was drawn in stark relief in April when the residents around the Aurora Reservoir challenged an application to drill 24 wells 3,000 feet from homes.
A grassroots group — Save the Aurora Reservoir, or STAR — hired Foote to represent them and paid for expert witnesses to outline impacts and risks to the ECMC, even though the closet home was about 3,000 feet away – well beyond the required setback
For its part, operator Crestone Peak Resources reduced the size of the project, cutting the drilling and fracking time by six months and committing to a series of best management practices, including using quieter, nonpolluting electric drill rigs and pipelines to cut truck traffic.
In the end, the commission approved the drilling plan on a 3-2 vote.
In casting his vote for the drilling pad, Robbins said, “If we say no here, then we might as well do away with the 2,000-foot setback, and we ought to start over.”
The lesson from the Aurora Reservoir decision for 350’s Leathwood is there is more to do. “There may be further legislation that’s needed,” she said, “like Robbins said about coming back to that setback rule.”
And so the war grinds on.
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