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In 2019, the Colorado legislature overhauled how the state regulates oil and gas development, including requiring an analysis of the cumulative impacts of oil and gas development on communities and wildlife. But a new draft rule implementing the cumulative impacts provision has been weakened after pushback from the oil and gas industry, the Colorado Sun reports. An earlier draft of the rule included a requirement that an operator secure the approval of residents before drilling within 2,000 feet of homes. The most recent draft, however, requires only that an operator conduct a more rigorous analysis of locations that will be within 2,000 feet of homes, and that an operator employ best management practices to mitigate the impacts of drilling.
Current regulations require a 2,000-foot setback from homes, schools and child-care centers, and other high-occupancy buildings, but operators can get around this by showing that they can provide "substantially equivalent protections," such as through the use of emissions-capturing equipment, or by securing the approval of residents. While any individual project may be able to mitigate its impacts sufficiently to comply with the setback rule, the proposed cumulative impacts rule is supposed to help the state consider the ways in which the impacts of the many wells can add up for nearby communities, even if each individual well in isolation is in compliance with the setback rule. In 2023, 19 of the 71 oil and gas development plans approved by the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission—more than one quarter of plans approved—were inside the 2,000-foot setback, according to the Colorado Sun.
In a statement to the Colorado Sun, the Commission said that, "given the vigorous debate on this issue in parties’ prehearing statements, staff decided to provide an alternative in this draft so that parties can provide their thoughts on one or both approaches in their responses." Mike Freeman, an attorney with EarthJustice, sees it differently: "The fact that so many in the industry lined up against this shows how big an issue this was and that the ECMC staff completely caved."
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I think at trial a group of citizens of West Texas will look and say, ‘Why aren’t you operators—who made billions of dollars extracting value from this land—owning up to your responsibility to take care of it?’”
