Colorado’s oil and gas industry says it’s reducing emissions at drilling sites by 95%. Environmentalists aren’t so sure.

A new battle between Colorado air regulators and environmentalists is brewing along the Front Range over how effective pollution-control devices at oil and gas drilling sites are at eliminating methane emissions — and a company set to drill near the Aurora Reservoir is at the center of that dispute.

At issue are enclosed combustion devices, or flares, that burn off methane and volatile organic compounds released by drilling operations in Colorado, one of the first states where the industry has widely adopted the technology.

The flares look similar to smokestacks and are designed to eliminate those harmful air pollutants, which contribute to ozone pollution and climate change, rather than release them into the air, where they drift toward residential areas and pollute the Front Range’s already dirty air.

State regulators and oil and gas companies say those flares eliminate 95% of the harmful emissions produced by oil wells. But environmentalists aren’t so sure.

There is little monitoring or testing to check the performance of those flares and it’s impossible to measure how effective they are, said Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that works on issues that affect plants, wildlife and people.

“If that assumption is not actually reality, that’s a huge problem,” Nichols said. “That means the so-called best rules on the books are just a facade.”

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in late September that asks an Adams County District Court judge to block two new air pollution permits that would authorize Crestone Peak Resources to operate two well pads in the county.

The center’s lawyers argue that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Air Pollution Control Division allows oil and gas companies to claim their enclosed combustion devices eliminate 95% of harmful air pollutants without actually verifying the emissions coming from the flares.

So far this year, the center has successfully petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to ask the state to redo three air pollution permits over the same issue. In those three cases, the EPA asked the state health department to revise the permits to more fully explain how the agency planned to ensure compliance with the 95% emission reductions that were promised.

In the most recent order from the EPA, issued on July 31, the Center for Biological Diversity had challenged a permit issued to HighPoint Operating Corporation’s Anschutz Equus Farms site in Weld County. The EPA agreed with the center’s assertion that, even with all of the engineering, maintenance and other controls in place, there was no assurance a 95% reduction in emissions would be achieved.

The EPA instructed the state to amend the permit to ensure compliance.

Now the center wants a district court judge to agree with its position on the flares, Nichols said.

“We’re definitely pushing the envelope,” Nichols said. “We are at a breaking point. We can’t afford to have any more flawed permits out there.”

“Robust permitting and testing programs”

Kate Malloy, a spokeswoman for the Air Pollution Control Division, said her agency would not comment on flaring at oil and gas well sites because of the lawsuit.

Dan Haley, chief executive officer of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, said a study by Enverus, an oil and gas industry consulting firm, found that Colorado’s Denver-Julesburg Basin has among the lowest greenhouse gas emissions of similar oil and gas producing regions in the country.

He added that the state’s operators already are heavily regulated and that they report emissions above the 95% threshold to state regulators when they happen.

“This is just another frivolous attempt by environmental activist organizations to create paperwork delays in already existing robust permitting and testing programs related to actual emission reductions,” Haley said of the lawsuit.

The Center for Biological Diversity chose Crestone Peak for its lawsuit, in part, because the company recently was the focal point of controversy for its permit application to frack near the Aurora Reservoir, a drinking water source for nearly 400,000 people. The Lowry Ranch project in unincorporated Arapahoe County was opposed by neighbors, who were concerned about the potential human health and ecological impacts of the project.

The state’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission, which regulates drilling, approved the application but required that all production be run by electricity, which is considered cleaner.

Crestone Peak, whose parent company is Civitas, is one of the largest oil and gas producers along the Front Range. Efforts to reach Civitas representatives to discuss flaring at the wells were unsuccessful.

The well pads that are the focus of the lawsuit are near Watkins, which is several miles north of the Lowry Ranch site.

“These caught our eye because Crestone is such a high-profile fracking company and we need to assure more scrutiny on them,” Nichols said of the lawsuit.

The Center for Biological Diversity wants Colorado to conduct continuous air quality monitoring at the site to determine whether the flares are achieving a 95% reduction in emissions, Nichols said.

“Without testing we don’t know,” he said.

“We just don’t have that data yet”

Andrew Klooster, a field advocate for Earthworks, travels the Front Range with an infrared camera to record emissions coming from well pads. The cameras detect particles that are invisible to the naked eye, and he has spent the past couple of years trying to figure out how efficient the flares are on drilling sites along the Front Range.

“In an ideal universe, these flares are running and destroying pollutants as efficiently as possible. That’s the ideal,” Klooster said. “The challenge is this idea of efficiency is assuming they are running properly, but there’s no real data to back it up.”

The cameras can show particles escaping but they cannot measure the volume.

“We just know some hydrocarbons are escaping,” Klooster said.

When the cameras detect a plume coming from a smokestack, Klooster sends the footage to the Air Pollution Control Division and the company that owns the drilling equipment. He estimates about a fifth of his reports result in work being done to fix equipment at a site.

“We’re still left in the dark with the efficiency because they are not performing a test afterward,” Klooster said. “Even when it’s fixed, we still don’t know if it’s working properly or not.”

Klooster is a certified optical gas imaging thermographer, but the oil and gas industry is critical of his work.

“It is imperative that individuals who are examining locations be properly trained in the use of flare cameras so that they can correctly attribute the results, since without the appropriate training, heat sources could be mistaken for a defective piece of equipment,” Haley said.

The state is testing flares to gather data, Klooster said. But the first round of testing won’t be concluded until May 2028 and then flares will be examined just once every five years. And a lot can happen in five years, Klooster said.

“Colorado is really one of the first states on a wide scale to adopt these enclosed combustion devices,” he said. “There’s just a lack of field testing in general. It could be with a lot more testing we demonstrate, ‘Oh, these things are operating as efficiently as they can be most of the time.’ We just don’t have that data yet.”

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