Fraccident Prone
For What It’s Worth
Last week’s football game between the Longmont Trojans and the Greeley West Spartans was interrupted when a high-pressure gas leak forced the evacuation of Greeley’s District 6 stadium.
According to The Greeley Tribune, several emergency calls were received and firefighters arrived at 8:15pm. Engineers from SRC Energy, which owns the well, arrived shortly after, and the leak was stopped by 9:52pm. Nobody was injured either because of the leak incident, or during the emergency evacuation of the stadium.
This is only the most recent of a series of methane-related accidents that are endangering, sometimes taking, human life in northeastern Colorado. Famously, last April in Firestone an uncapped flowline leaked and caused a house to explode, killing two men and injuring a woman and a child. That well was owned and operated by Anadarko Petroleum.
The well that was the source of the methane in the Firestone incident had been closed in 2016, which was apparently when the flowline was cut, but it was reopened again in 2017, setting the scene for the explosion. The house was 200 feet from the well. Regulations in Firestone only require that wells are sited 150 feet from houses.
In June a wide-ranging inspection of flow lines within 1000 feet of any occupied property began. Days before the end of the 2017 legislative session, Democrats in the Colorado State House proposed a bill that would have required companies engaged in gas and oil drilling to disclose the location of all gas lines, but Republicans blocked the legislation, running out the clock on the legislature.
The Republicans in the State Legislature routinely oppose any legislation that restricts the activity of gas and oil development. An egregious case of this was Democratic Representative Mike Foote’s bill which would have required that the setback for new wells be computed from the edge of a schoolyard rather than from the nearest wall of the school building. As a result of this bill’s failure, Extraction Gas and Oil’s permit to build Vetting 15H: a 24 head directional well pad near Bella Romero Academy outside Greeley, remains unchallenged.
What IS is Worth?
Colorado produces more natural gas than all the energy it consumes in a year across the entire energy sector. Colorado already exports more than 70% of the natural gas it produces. And Niobrara-Wattenberg shale in northeastern Colorado has some of the lowest extraction costs around.
However, the cost of generating electricity with solar energy has dropped even faster than the cost of extracting methane from shale and using it to power steam turbines. According to energysage.com:
Wind generation’s cost is also falling fast, coming in between 3 and 6 cents per kWh. Of course, we cannot expect the world, or even Colorado, where renewable resources are also unusually plentiful, to transition to 100% renewable energy next week, or even in a decade. There are complexities.
Wind and Solar generation are less controllable than coal or methane-fired steam turbines. A smarter distribution grid is needed to handle variable energy sources coming on and going off with little warning, to smooth the power supply and match it with demand. At night, the supply may fall farther than demand does, so some efficient storage mechanism or a very wide grid is needed. It doesn’t mean we can transition tomorrow, just because renewables are cheaper already.
What it does mean is this: There is no reason to drill near population centers. There is no reason (except greed and laziness) to risk even one human life to extract methane residing under Greeley, or Erie, or Firestone, or Longmont.
The Eastern Plains need the economic engine of fossil fuels for a while longer. But the resources are plentiful. Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel to use while we transition to renewable energy. But the transition must happen. Let’s not let the desperation of the dying oil and gas industry place our lives and health at risk.
Originally published in The Weathervane No 17 on September 14, 2017. [Subscribe]
