Tag: wildlife habitat

A nonprofit sportsmen’s group Thursday released a report detailing 10 years of oil and gas spills in the three counties in Northwest Colorado that include parts of the heavily drilled Piceance Basin. The Bull Moose Sportsmen’s Alliance released an analysis (pdf) detailing nearly 1,000 spills of wastewater, oil and other fluids between 2001 and 2010 – or a rate of about 100 a year. The data came from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), which regulates oil and gas drilling in the state.

A new poll released Thursday by the National Wildlife Federation (pdf) found that nearly two-thirds of Coloradans surveyed favor more oversight of the state’s oil and gas industry, as well as mandatory requirements for best technological practices to better protect public health and wildlife habitat.

While not exactly a hotbed of natural gas drilling, according to the Aspen Times, Pitkin County - home to Aspen and the scenic Roaring...

State Rep. Laura Bradford says ranchers and landowners in and around Grand Junction and Mesa County are enraged by new, more environmentally stringent drilling regulations keeping them from fully developing their oil and gas mineral rights.

With new, more environmentally stringent oil- and gas-drilling regulations a perfunctory state Senate vote and gubernatorial signature away from going into effect next month, all the Republican gnashing of teeth seems to have fallen largely on deaf ears.

The oil-and-gas debate on Colorado’s Western Slope is as rife with contradictions as the ridgelines and valleys of Garfield County are with drilling rigs. Hunters in pickup trucks you’d expect to see plastered with “Drill here, drill now” bumper stickers instead sport the “Save the Roan” rallying cry. Ski-area executives whose industry in some cases was built with oil money can’t buy enough wind energy nor contribute fast enough to campaigns to raise oil and gas severance taxes.