Tag: wattenberg field

BOULDER -- Supporters of local bans on the oil-and-gas drilling process known as fracking celebrated a key high court victory in Pennsylvania last week.

Colorado Rep Cory Gardner and his wife Jaime took a $17,000 five-day trip to Ireland in August, paid for by the Republican Party Ripon Society and the oil-magnate Koch brothers-funded Franklin Center.

Today in Greeley, the city at the heart of Colorado's Front Range "frack country," a seven-member planning commission will consider a proposal by oil and gas company Synergy to add three more well-drilling facilities "and related equipment" to a site already being drilled in a scenic residential neighborhood roughly three miles from the city center. Synergy is one of the companies working the boom in natural-gas extraction in area of the rich Wattenberg Field, which stretches under most of north-east Colorado. The boom is mostly the product of the effectiveness of hydraulic fracturing, the extraction technique where millions of gallons of a mixture of water, chemicals and sand is blasted deep into the earth to free trapped gas.

ASPEN-- This tony resort town, set high above the heavily plied natural-gas fields of the Colorado Front Range, was the unlikely scene on Saturday of the latest clash in the running battle in the state over the controversial natural-gas-extraction method known as fracking. More than 100 anti-fracking protesters gathered outside the Democratic Governors Association meeting held here, waving signs, shouting slogans and staging street-theater scenes in an attempt to draw the attention of Governor John Hickenlooper and the other "important state leaders and presidential hopefuls" in attendance.

The state of Colorado has joined a lawsuit filed by oil-and-gas companies against the city of Longmont that seeks to lift a ban on fracking passed by citizen initiative there last November.