Climate battle over air quality - Western Colorado Alliance for Community Action

As a new year approaches, our Alliance’s members have been hard at work trying to limit the impact of drilling in Garfield County, shaping bonding requirements for operators in the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), and advocating for robust federal leasing and financial assurance rules to pass through Congress.

In January of this year, Colorado publicly released its Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Roadmap (GHG Roadmap), detailing the steps our state needs to take to reduce its contributions to climate change and hasten the transition to clean sources of energy. Included in this “roadmap” were specific targets that provided the impetus controlling greenhouse gas emissions: a 26% reduction from 2005 levels by 2025, a 50% reduction by 2030, and a 90% reduction in emissions by 2050.

In order to achieve these targets, Colorado must cut 36.4 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2025, another 33.6 million by 2030, and another 56 million tons by 2050. For oil & gas emissions in particular, the GHG roadmap calls for a 60% reduction in emissions by 2030 from 2005 levels.

The need for meaningful climate policy reform has never been more pronounced.

Despite this urgency, the Polis administration has chosen to advance an “intensity monitoring” approach to regulating oil & gas emissions, which relies on operators to monitor and report their own emissions to the state. Moreover, the intensity rate calls for oil & gas producers to reduce their emissions per barrel of oil equivalent (BoE), which means that operators could actually increase the amount of fossil fuels they produce so long as they maintain the ratios called for under the proposed intensity rule.

In response, conservation, environmental, and community groups throughout Colorado have raised the alarm. They’ve also drawn attention to the fact that this methodology for reducing emissions has no precedent, and that our state can ill afford to waste time on an untested approach should it fail to achieve the reductions necessary to meet its goals.

Air Pollution Control Division (APCD) staff insist that the intensity rule will provide the flexibility that operators need to meet their emission reduction obligations while accounting for the individual compositions of equipment and production at their respective sites. The staff notes that Colorado already has a number of regulations that already reduce emissions, and so an intensity approach gives operators the discretion to make adjustments where they make the most sense.

Still, critics of the intensity rule remain unconvinced. In addition to the moral hazard of industry policing itself and the possibility of emissions from fossil fuel use overtaking any gains made in emission reductions from the production process, organizations opposing the intensity rule — including our Alliance — note that the incomplete data from which the intensity targets were derived are not good enough.

In 2019, oil & gas production was thought to have released some 22 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere — approximately 17% of Colorado’s overall estimated emissions. However, by the APCD’s own admission, the division is still missing data that it will not have until at least 2023. Incidentally, that is the same year that thefirst emission reduction plans would be due for oil and gas operators — plans that the AQCC would have no authority to enforce, and for which no penalty could be imposed should operators fail to meet their emissions reduction targets.
For those of us who live on the Western Slope, the reality is that we cannot be satisfied with an unproven regulatory approach to reducing emissions at a time when historic drought is crippling our agricultural sector, and our air quality is earning failing grades from the American Lung Association. Our next opportunity to demand action from the AQCC is on December 14, where they will consider changes to Regulation 7 oil & gas air emissions.

As we head into 2022, our Alliance will continue to fight for robust, protective, transparent, and enforceable rules that will hold operators accountable for the emissions they produce, and help Colorado meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets.
It’s a New Year’s resolution worth keeping.

About the author

Brian Williams

Brian joined Western Colorado Alliance as a community organizer in April 2020. With a professional background in elections and the court system, Brian specializes in working with our partners to shape oil and gas policy. Having grown up on the Western Slope, he is committed to working toward a strong, sustainable future for our community. Brian also volunteers with Mesa County Library’s literacy and pathway to citizenship programs. As an avid board game enthusiast, he enjoys opportunities to strategize and build winning coalitions. Brian received his bachelor's degree in political science from Colorado Mesa University, and his master’s degree in public administration from the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Public Affairs.