October 15, 2024
Denver—Today, Colorado’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) finalized new rules that make progress toward protecting the state’s environment and communities, yet do not entirely fulfill its statutory mandate to evaluate and address the oil and gas industry’s cumulative impacts.
The Colorado legislature has long sought to get a big-picture view of oil and gas impacts, and how they contribute to cumulative harms to public health and the environment. The General Assembly passed three laws in 2019, 2023, and 2024, directing the ECMC to assess the industry’s cumulative impacts and this is the first time rules have been finalized and released.
Oil and gas extraction has far reaching environmental effects that extend well beyond the drilling site, including those from road construction, increased traffic, and drifting air pollution. However, under the new rules, impacts to the environment would only be studied within a one mile “area of evaluation” around the drilling site.
As directed by House Bill 24-1346, the area of evaluation should be defined by the nature, intensity, and scope of each unique oil and gas operation and the geographic extent of its potential impacts. The Commission’s final rules instead set a default area that ignores this charge and scientific expertise. While the area can be modified on a case-by-case basis, expert agencies like Colorado Parks and Wildlife must advocate to expand the area for each proposed oil and gas operation. This is too onerous to be effective in practice, leaving the Commission without a full picture of how oil and gas operations contribute to impacts already affecting fish, wildlife, irreplaceable ecosystems, and nearby communities.
The Commission did, however, increase the default area of evaluation for surface water resources from one mile to 2.5, as recommended by experts from the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment. Western Resource Advocates (WRA) applauds the Commission’s efforts to more closely align the area of evaluation for surface water with scientific evidence.
As advocated for by WRA, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and the Colorado Wildlife Federation, the Commission adopted a definition of “biological resources” in the final rules. Biological resources include all invertebrates and rare plants, and their habitats. The inclusion of this definition is critical to protecting these often overlooked, but integral aspects of the environment. The Commission did not, however, commit to a strict timeline to promulgate rules to protect biological resources, and without built-in accountability mechanisms, it’s possible these directives could fall flat. WRA urges the Commission to conduct a future rulemaking on biological resources as soon as possible.
In the final rules, ECMC also did not mandate the creation of a statewide database that would detail all surface disturbances from all sources of development to a given area. Such a database would widen the Commission’s aperture to encompass all existing impacts to an area, not just those from oil and gas development, and ensure a true cumulative impacts assessment is completed before new wells are approved. WRA strongly advises the Commission to develop such a database in the future.
The Commission faced a very tough task in this rulemaking—to craft rules that are both meaningful and workable – and it made some improvements that at least on paper seek to evaluate the harms caused by the oil and gas industry. But the Commission’s job was to enact rules to first evaluate and then address the cumulative impacts of oil and gas operations on public health and the environment, and realistically it left both runners on base. The rules default to only examining impacts within a narrow and arbitrary radius and don’t require the Commission to take any substantive action to protect wildlife or water from ongoing and mounting harm.
The Commission adopted the substance today, and the rules—subject to non-substantive revisions for typographical errors—can be found here.
