The Ritter administration, which successfully midwived a compromise between environmental protection and natural gas development in the Roan Plateau, seems headed for a similar middle ground for energy development on private lands throughout Colorado.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether Ritter’s labors will bear fruit on the Roan. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management rejected most of the state’s comments and plans to proceed with its original leasing plan for the federally owned land that comprises about half the environmentally sensitive plateau. Members of the state’s congressional delegation are now trying to write the enhanced protections proposed by Ritter into federal law.
In contrast, Ritter is playing a much stronger hand with his efforts to strike a new balance between environmental concerns and the surging demand for energy on private lands throughout the state.
That’s because the 2007 Colorado legislature already blessed his efforts to replace the old seven-member Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), long dominated by five industry appointees, with a new regulatory body with only three industry slots among its nine members. The law also gave the expanded commission authority to protect the public health, safety, welfare, wildlife and the environment.
The first effort to translate those new objectives into detailed regulations — known as a “pre-draft” outline — sent shock waves through the industry, which claimed the regs would put interminable and costly delays on oil and gas drilling.
Last week’s release of a more refined set of “draft” regulations should go a long way to ease such concerns. In several cases, COGCC staff clearly took the industry objections seriously and tried to accommodate them where feasible.
For instance, the preliminary rules would have given “standing” to owners of land adjacent to proposed oil and gas developments, meaning they could protest such projects in a separate hearing before the commission. In the new version, adjacent landowners can still offer their thoughts during the customary 30-day public commentary period, but such unhappy neighbors will not have standing to demand a subsequent public hearing on the same issue. That should reduce the possibility of operators being harassed by NIMBY tactics.
The Colorado Oil & Gas Association expressed initial optimism at the new draft, but later expressed numerous fears, including that “The draft rules will result in shutting down entire fields west of Interstate 25 for up to 90 days based on arbitrary limitations ostensibly to protect certain species such as sage grouse, elk and mule deer. This is despite the fact that the Division of Wildlife says that Colorado has too many elk and that last year saw a ten-year record harvest of mule deer.”
In that statement, energy industry officials may be walking a fine line between reasonable negotiation and being careless about what they wish for. If Colorado truly has too many elk, it may well be possible to infringe a bit more into their breeding grounds. But the sage grouse is perilously close to being listed by the federal government as an endangered species — a designation that would trigger outright bans on drilling far more draconian than the milder restrictions the state is seeking.
The point to remember is that the draft rules are just that — a draft.
The commission will now hold public hearings on the proposals in June before voting on them in mid-July. That means there is still time for the commission staff and industry leaders to continue what in our judgment has evolved into a fairly responsible dialogue behind its somewhat exaggerated public posturing.
