Garfield County plans to launch a study to determine what portions of its air pollutants are attributable to oil and gas development, traffic and other sources.
The research would come in response not to a problem, but to a positive trend. The county’s air quality has been improving over the last decade, but public health experts up to now have only been able to speculate as to why.
The county long has been conducting a robust program to monitor air quality, largely in response to oil and gas development occurring locally. County officials say monitoring results show the air is clean and getting cleaner. Some of that could be a result of the slowdown in drilling over the last decade, or due to tightened state air-pollution rules that have better controlled pollution even as the county’s overall active well count has grown. The reduction also could be thanks to cleaner-burning vehicles on the roads in a county bisected by Interstate 70.
In a work session Wednesday, county commissioners supported the proposal by its public health staff to spend $75,000 on a source apportionment study aimed at pinpointing where pollutants known as volatile organic compounds come from. The commissioners would have to formally approve the expenditure before it could go forward.
The county would pay Colorado State University’s Atmospheric Science Department to conduct the study. CSU proposes approaches involving statistical analysis using a method called positive matrix factorization.