Three oil and gas companies have been fined nearly $700,000 for allowing loose dirt from a pipeline project and access road to wash over a cliff into Garden Gulch and then on into Parachute Creek above the Western Slope town…
Perhaps when mayors of small mountain towns on Colorado’s Western Slope express concerns about the environmental impacts of natural gas drilling it doesn’t cause too many ripples nationally, but when it becomes a campaign issue in the Big Apple, people…
Analysts who track natural gas prices and supplies say the industry is banking on a cold winter and an economic recovery to bolster a commodity that has taken a beating on stock exchanges in recent days.
Natural gas price…
The resignation of Meg Collins as president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA) has touched off speculation in conservation circles that the state’s leading trade group for the oil and gas industry was dissatisfied with the worsening…
Using some rather pointed language aimed at Bush administration energy policies in general and former Vice President Dick Cheney in particular, Colorado Rep.’s Diana DeGette, D-Denver, and Jared Polis, D-Boulder, Tuesday introduced the FRAC Act aimed at closing a natural-gas drilling loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Officials for the natural gas industry are quick to point out that a process called hydraulic fracturing has been in use for more than 60 years without a single documented case of groundwater contamination by the chemicals used to make gas flow more freely from wells.
But U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette is just as quick to respond that it’s hard to document contamination when no one outside of the industry knows exactly what kinds of chemicals are being injected along with high-pressure water into wells to force open rock formations thousands of feet below the surface.
Republican Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn recently introduced a bill that would reinstate the Bush administration’s midnight oil shale leasing regulations that were quickly reversed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in the first month’s of the Obama administration.
Besides winning the award for the most convoluted legislative acronym, Lamborn’s Protecting Investment in Oil shale the Next generation of Environment, Energy, and Resource security (PIONEER) Act, H.R. 2540, comes at a time when Colorado officials are skeptically asking for more accountability from current oil shale leases.
The Governor’s Energy Office has an ambitious goal of expediting the addition of another 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy generation to Colorado’s electricity grid in the next few years, but the single biggest hurdle may be adding the necessary transmission lines.
Representatives of companies building utility-scale renewable projects like the 8-megawatt SunEdison solar plant in Colorado’s San Luis Valley say sun and wind generation facilities can be permitted and built in under two years, but transmission lines can take more than a decade to become reality.
Picture a scenario sometime after 2010 where — if Gov. Bill Ritter is reelected and the Dems keep control of the statehouse — we’ll all be driving plug-in hybrids that run on a mix of ethanol and ground-up bark beetles, with tiny snowboarders emblazoned on our license plates.
It’s a nightmare vision for most right-wingers, straight out of the Shangri-La they sneeringly refer to as the “People’s Republic of Boulder,” but it’s a little closer to reality today after Governor Renewable signed House Bill 1331, which provides state tax incentives for high-tech, fuel-efficient vehicles.
Rural electric co-ops that gamble on low-cost coal while largely keeping their member-owners in the dark about future financial risks may be playing with federal regulatory fire in the form of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, according to an attorney for the renewable-energy sector.
Ron Lehr, attorney for Interwest Energy Alliance and former chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC), said board members of rural electric co-ops need to go to great lengths to divulge to their members the potential risks of investing in coal-fired power plants with a possible federal carbon tax or cap-and-trade policy looming.
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