Colorado oil and gas regulators adopted sweeping rules Tuesday to address the cumulative impacts of drilling and hailed them as “a big step forward,” but lawmakers, environmentalists and community groups criticized the regulations for not failed to protect vulnerable communities.

After a year of hearings and drafts, the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission adopted approximately 60 pages of rules to assess and mitigate the impacts of oil and gas drilling projects – an exercise for which the commission was mandated by the legislator.

“This has been a Herculean effort,” said ECMC President Jeff Robbins. “We have the most protective oil and gas regulations in the country, and this builds on that foundation. It puts in place even stronger protections for Colorado families.

Critics didn’t see it that way. “This requires no more than is currently necessary and it creates a road map for how an operator can drill in disproportionately impacted communities,” said Michael Freeman, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice.

These communities are low-income, of color, have vulnerable populations, or face disproportionate environmental burdens.

“It’s time to put health first,” said Rachael Lehman, environmental justice coordinator for the Black Parents United Foundation. “For too long, economic impacts have been the sole indicator of success and a guiding principle for permitting. »

A major point of contention was a June draft’s requirement that an operator seeking to drill within 2,000 feet of homes in a disproportionately impacted community, or DIC, must obtain consent from each resident.

The provision drew criticism from the industry, which argued it could make the development of oil and gas reserves nearly impossible. It was dropped in the August draft on which the final rules are based.

The move prompted a letter from 22 lawmakers saying the August bill provided inadequate protections for disproportionately impacting communities, failing to meet goals set by state law.

In 2020, the commission adopted a rule requiring a 2,000-foot drilling setback from homes and schools unless an operator adds measures providing protections “substantially equivalent” to those provided by the setback.

However, over the past two years, nearly half of the 87 approved oil and gas development plans on the Front Range, primarily in the shale-rich DJ Basin, were within 2,000 feet of homes, according to the annual assessment of the cumulative impacts of ECMC.

“The commission adopted a rollback in 2020 with great fanfare, but they have not implemented it,” said Freeman, the Earthjustice attorney.

Most drilling will take place in disproportionately affected communities

In her testimony at the cumulative impacts hearings, Julia Rhine, an attorney representing Civitas Resources, said, “just because of the nature of the DJ Basin and where the mineral resources are…many places, maybe being the majority of locations, we think they will be in the DICs. .”

State Rep. Elizabeth Velasco, a Glenwood Springs Democrat and sponsor of cumulative impacts and environmental justice legislation and a signatory to the critical letter to the commission, said the rules fail to protect communities vulnerable.

“We’ve heard that a few things have been addressed regarding buffer zones and environmental justice, but there are still things that concern us,” Velasco said. “We must continue to work on the legislation. If they can’t achieve this through rules, we will need to have more prescriptive legislation.”

The rules require operators to assess the impacts of their drilling sites within a one-mile radius of their platforms and for water resources up to 2½ miles away, 5 miles if it potentially impacts the drinking water supply.

The problem is that it hands the role of assessing cumulative impacts to oil and gas operators who have no environmental or health expertise but are biased, said Heidi Leathwood, a climate policy analyst at the within the environmental group 350 Colorado.

Leathwood also criticized the decision to limit the scope of the assessment to one kilometer “despite evidence received that hydraulic fracturing emissions are linked to health impacts well over one kilometer from oil and gas facilities.”

To mitigate impacts, the rules call for better management practices and improved systems and practices where appropriate.

ECMC will also assist the Air Pollution Control Division in enforcing the division’s methane intensity rule, which sets a limit on emissions per barrel of oil and gas equivalent produced.

The rules create a community liaison position to help communities with operators and with the commission, as well as stricter requirements for notifications and meetings with the community.

“Procedural measures for disproportionately impacted communities and air pollution intensity regulations are steps in the right direction,” said Andrew Forkes-Gudmundson, senior director of state policy at Earthworks. “But without substantive protections and quantitative limits, procedural protections don’t mean much in practice.”

Goal posts were ‘repeatedly moved’ during five years of regulation

The industry response has been mixed.

“The set of rules adopted today are the result of a statutory directive to further protect disproportionately impacted communities and we hope they will work as intended,” said Kait Schwartz, director of API Colorado, a professional group, in a press release.

But Schwartz added that the industry has faced five years of constant regulation as “state lawmakers have repeatedly shifted the focus of the regulatory regime.”

The Colorado Oil and Gas Association, the state’s largest trade group, said in a statement that while the new rule is “a notable improvement over the original draft, the commission continues to make it increasingly difficult to “Operating Colorado’s Small Oil and Gas Companies.” adding, once again, endless hurdles to the permitting process.