Silt – The drilling boom brought Lloyd and Rita Jane Moore an unwanted dirt road snaking through their pasture to a 3-acre pad with seven wells.
It put a bottled-water dispenser in their kitchen when their well ran dry.
It brings noises. The worst was a dynamite blast that spooked one of their horses, who bolted into a barbed-wire fence and opened a bloody gash under one shoulder.
“He was torn up real bad,” Lloyd Moore said, clasping his callused hands into a triangular wedge. “You could probably put both your hands in it.”
The Moores live on 37 of the more than 5 million acres of Colorado’s “split-estate” land – where homeowners, farmers and ranchers own the surface, and government, energy companies or others own the minerals below.
The battle between homeowners such as the Moores and the energy companies drilling on their land has spilled into the halls of the state legislature.
For the second straight year, Western Slope lawmakers are pushing a bill to give landowners more protection from oil and gas development.
Blocked by the energy industry last year, landowners say they’ll move for a citizen initiative if a strong bill isn’t passed.
And the pressure continues to grow, with record numbers of drilling permits issued each of the last two years. Four thousand wells are expected to be drilled this year.
The House has already passed – 60-3 – a compromise version, which the industry calls workable and environmentalists say guts the protections.
Supporters of the bill want added rights for landowners in negotiating how and where drilling occurs and more compensation for damages.
When industry knocks, many people “don’t even understand it’s a negotiation,” said Gwen Lachelt, director of the nonprofit Oil and Gas Accountability Project in Durango.
“They feel their only option is to sign whatever the industry hands them,” she said.
Eleven other states have surface-owner protection laws, Lachelt said.
The energy industry has rights too, said Ken Wonstolen, general counsel for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association: “You have to have a right to drill a well.”
Still, the industry recognizes its responsibility “to pay the surface owner to lift the trapdoor,” Wonstolen said.
Last year, only 4 percent of well permits in Garfield County – the most actively drilled county in the state – lacked landowner agreements.
“That looks like a lot of progress to me,” Wonstolen said.
There is no tally of how many Colorado landowners are vulnerable to uninvited drilling.
About one-third of permits approved by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission go to companies drilling where the landowner has no mineral rights.
The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees federal drilling leases, says the government retains mineral rights below 5.2 million acres of private Colorado land.
Pete Morton, a Wilderness Society economist, calculates that land and minerals are owned separately on more than 10 million acres overlying five major oil and gas basins in the Rocky Mountain states.
When a gas driller appears, landowners have two choices: negotiate a surface-use agreement, which generally includes a goodwill payment, or refuse to sign.
If the property owner refuses to sign, the owner of the mineral rights can post a bond and drill anyway.
Since 2000, the state has granted more than 2,500 drilling permits to companies that posted a $25,000 bond to cover damages.
East of Durango, Jim Fitzgerald has lived through 16 years of drilling on and near his ranch, despite his refusal to sign a contract. He has been paid nearly $20,000 on his one-eighth interest in a well.
“I’d give it up in a minute if they’d go away,” Fitzgerald said.
Drilling took 36 trees from his land beside the San Juan National Forest, and when workers open valves to relieve pipeline pressure, “the horses just go nuts,” Fitzgerald said.
“I had a team run away with me when one of these wells blew off,” he said. “They ended up crashing into an oak grove.”
The Moores tried to gain the mineral rights after they bought their home in 1993.
They paid two years of taxes owed by a bankrupt company before the county sent a refund with an explanation that the rights had been sold.
A new owner, Ballard Petroleum, then announced plans to drill for gas on their land. The Moores signed a contract that paid $6,000 for the trouble.
Lloyd Moore said he walked the site with a company representative, staking out a road that would border the edge of his land.
He came home one day to find the road cut through the heart of his property to the drilling site.
After four years of drilling and production by two companies, the road still blocks his irrigation system.
Gas drilling blew the top off a neighbor’s water well, Moore said, and a chemical spill ran down a gully into another neighbor’s pond.
The Moores say EnCana Corp., which acquired Ballard and added more wells on their land, has done more to accommodate their concerns. They also find production less intrusive than drilling.
Still, production brings an endless rumble of tank trucks hauling away watery byproducts from condensate tanks. And when workers “come down and bleed these high-pressure lines,” Lloyd Moore said, “it sounds worse than a jet taking off.”
The Moores also wonder why their well ran dry.
Last summer, a man who came to test the quality of water in their well couldn’t draw more than a trickle.
“The next day, EnCana started hauling us water,” Moore said.
EnCana also brings drinking water to several of their neighbors, Moore said, but denies its activities affected their wells.
Garfield County administrators say gas drilling thousands of feet below ground should not affect shallow water sources.
“A lot of people want to blame the oil and gas companies for their wells going dry. Nobody’s been able to prove that,” Assistant County Manager Jesse Smith said.
“We would agree with the county’s assessment,” EnCana spokesman Doug Hock said. “We don’t believe it’s the result of our drilling.”
By now, the Moores have learned the importance of negotiation. When EnCana arrived with expansion plans, the couple put detailed demands on paper.
They asked for, and got, a sturdy fence with wood posts every 10 feet separating their cows and horses from the gas business.
EnCana has promised sprinklers to replace their irrigation system, trees to obscure its drilling pad and $6,000 for any horse seriously injured or killed.
The prospect of gas wells and truck traffic for the next 40 years was not negotiable.
The Moores have a back-deck view of the Flattop Mountains and great herds of elk that range among the ranchettes.
All the same, they are thinking of moving away from the odors, the noise and the derricks that light the night sky.
They fear that their home has been devalued much more than the $6,000 they were paid.
Assuming they can sell, Rita Jane Moore wants one thing at their next country home.
It will be “somewhere,” she said, “where we’ve got all the mineral rights.”
Staff writer David Olinger can be reached at 303-820-1498 or dolinger@denverpost.com.
