Have Colorado's Floods Unleashed An Oil And Gas Disaster? Um, No.
Into these muddy floodwaters, 20,000 gallons of oil is far less than a drop in the bucket. Gov. John Hickenlooper said late Thursday that the South Platte will have no trouble dispersing any leaked oil into nothingness. “When you look at the amount of water flowing through that river, it will process these pollutants very, very rapidly,” he said.
In fact, according to the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, the impact of any oil spills on the watershed will be far less significant than the millions of gallons of raw sewage has leaked into flood waters along with other household and industrial chemicals.
Weld County spokesperson Jennifer Finch told a reporter, ”There’s a lot of stuff in that water. What we’re primarily worried about is the sewage and the [agricultural] runoff — fertilizer stuff from people’s lawns, to manure from the dairy farms.”
Likewise, anyone seeking to use the floods as a reason to ban fracking in Colorado is just as full of manure as the floodwaters.
The headlines tell it all: Biblical floods in Colorado threaten to unleash an oily apocalypse across the front range of the Rockies, as thousands of wells gush forth coating millions of acres in a sheen of crude oil and toxic fracking fluids.
Are you scared yet of this oilpocalypse? Well, you shouldn’t be.
Here’s the facts. The area most affected by Colorado’s flooding is home to more than 20,000 active oil and gas wells. In recent years the Denver-Julesberg Basin has been a hotbed of drilling and fracking as companies like Anadarko and Noble develop the giant Wattenberg field and target the Niobrara shale. The region produces some 134,000 barrels per day.
As the floodwaters rose last week operators activated heavy-duty valves to shut in more than 1,900 wells. There were a few minor spills. Anadarko appears to have lost two storage tanks containing about 450 barrels of oil (about 20,000 gallons) that got washed into flood waters. Noble had a couple wells and gathering pipelines leak small amounts of natural gas. The Colorado Oil And Gas Association says that they are investigating how many open pits containing produced water may have been scoured out by flood waters, but they reassure the anti-fracking crowd that there were no fracking operations being conducted, “This means no fracking fluids, no chemicals associated with fracking, nor equipment were on sites at the time of the flooding.”
Anadarko is working to trap any oil floating from their operations into the South Platte and St. Vrain rivers, as it should. But despite the cries of the anti-oil crowd — who are already using the flooding as an excuse to petition Gov. John Hickenlooper to ban fracking — this 20,000 gallons is no oil spill disaster.
Let’s put it into perspective.
William Porter at the Denver Post took a look at the numbers behind the flood waters. He figured that the 25 square miles that constitute Boulder received 4.5 billion gallons of rain as of a week ago. Boulder Creek hit a record flow rate of 4,500 cubic feet per second. At 7.48 gallons per cubic foot that’s almost 34,000 gallons per second. Or 2 million gallons per minute. Or 121 million gallons per hour. And that’s just one river.
The South Platte River is currently flooding into Nebraska, where according to the U.S. Geological Survey gauges, the river is running at 19,000 cubic feet per second. That’s 142,000 gallons per second, 8.5 million gallons per minute, 500 million gallons per hour.