The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rejected four Colorado-issued air pollution permits at Weld County oil and gas processing sites, saying the state must rewrite the permits to ensure ozone-causing chemicals are burned off before hitting the atmosphere.
Environmental advocates who won the EPA order through petitions say the ruling could impact thousands of other oil and gas permits in Colorado and other states, because Colorado’s recent ozone failures mean far more drillers must get air pollution permits limiting ozone-causing chemicals. The EPA may now consistently order those drilling and processing sites to test the effectiveness of their toxics flaring rather than rely on predictions of how the equipment will work, the advocates said.
Colorado’s Air Pollution Control Division “rubber-stamps nearly identical construction permits that contain these same flaws,” said Ryan Maher, an attorney with one of the petitioners, the Center for Biological Diversity.
With nine counties on the northern Front Range now in “severe” violation of EPA ozone limits, Maher said, “this means that many oil and gas production facilities have to get a permit for the first time, and won’t be able to rely on the defective approach to ensuring flare compliance EPA pushed back on here.”
Ideally, Maher said, Colorado officials will rewrite the Bonanza Creek permits and future permits to demand testing of flared toxic emissions rather than the state’s current “anything-but-actual-data approach.”
The larger-scale flaring of natural gas at well sites, because producers don’t want to contain or pipe the gas, was prohibited in Colorado by 2020 rules. The Bonanza Creek permits deal with a form of contained flaring, taking place inside what the EPA calls “enclosed combustion devices,” that burns off toxic byproducts of oil and natural gas production such as nitrogen oxides and benzene.
Officials from the Colorado Air Pollution Control Division on Tuesday said they were reviewing the decision.
The Center for Biological Diversity, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Colorado GreenLatinos and others petitioned the EPA about the Bonanza Creek permits in August. The permits, issued by Colorado and initially receiving no objections from the EPA, concern four large oil and gas well pads in northern Colorado. Weld County, where much of Colorado’s fracking activity is located, was the most recent addition to the longstanding ozone nonattainment area on the Front Range.
The environmental groups say the tanks, operating engines, vents, oil loading and leaking pipes at such well pads together emit toxic gases ranging from nitrogen oxides, benzene and volatile organic compounds to particulate matter. Nitrogen oxide and VOCs are two of the components that rise into the air above the Front Range, bake under the intense summer sun and create toxic ozone that causes lung and heart issues.
Flaring or burning the toxins at the well pads can eliminate much of the toxic gas. Some permits demand that 95% of the toxic gases be eliminated onsite. But current permitting at thousands of Colorado wells requires only that a flaring process be in place, Maher said, such as proof that a pilot light stays lit or that smoke from flaring combustion is visible. There is no measurement of the smoke or remaining gases to prove that 95% of the toxins have actually been eliminated, he said.
“The car-owning public has to get tailpipe emissions tested regularly to ensure compliance with pollution limits. But the division allows facilities to rely on several flawed proxy factors to claim that flares are working properly instead of testing,” Maher said. “Where this testing has occurred, the division’s own data shows that some flares have failed to operate at the required standard. EPA data has shown the same.”
Bonanza Creek Energy, which merged with Extraction Oil & Gas in 2021 to create Civitas Resources, did not respond to messages about the EPA ruling.
The EPA’s 16-page decision agrees with environmental advocates saying Colorado has no proof the required systems are cutting pollution. “It is unclear … how the monitoring requirements assure that the (devices) continually achieve the specific 95% control efficiency required in the permits,” says the ruling, under EPA Administrator Michael Regan’s signature.
In responding to the petition’s challenges, the EPA adds, Colorado’s air pollution division does not “explain how the permit conditions assure compliance, but merely asserts that they do.”
With the Bonanza Creek permits now returned to state regulators for revision, Colorado must decide if it will offer more detailed justification for leaving monitoring requirements the way they are, or rewrite them to include testing of the emissions plume left over when producers burn the toxins onsite.
The advocacy coalition said they will be watching to make sure actual testing becomes the standard for Colorado oil and gas permits, and work to spread the requirement across other producing states.
Colorado GreenLatinos’ Ean Tafoya called the EPA ruling “exciting” for communities disproportionately impacted by ozone pollution. “We will continue to exercise more sophisticated legal strategies to bring wins to voices that go unheard,” he said.