Western Slope residents must fight state Air Quality Control Commission
By Ray ScottWestern Colorado’s energy- producing counties are never ones to avoid a fight. And join a fight they did this month, by acquiring party status in Colorado’s latest round of Denver-based oil and gas regulations.
When the governor’s Air Quality Control Commission visited Grand Junction last summer to hear from our community about air quality, the members of the commission clearly didn’t bother to listen. And why would they? When eight of the nine air commissioners share a Denver area zip code, it results in a strange but convenient loss of hearing that occurs at the Continental Divide.
Thank goodness the county commissioners of Mesa, Moffat, Garfield, Rio Blanco and Montezuma Counties are giving our community a voice in these onerous regulations. They can help tell the air commission our story of natural gas and its history of improving local air quality and economies.
Last week, The Daily Sentinel reported on the Asbury natural gas storage facility just a stone’s throw north of Grand Junction. As important as this field is today for storing natural gas, the Asbury wells were even more important in 1949. For it was the Asbury field, drilled by the Amerada Petroleum Corporation, that produced Grand Junction’s first commercial natural gas wells in 1950.
Before 1950, primitive coal furnaces heated just about every home and business in Grand Junction. We’re not talking about the clean-coal technologies of today. Think grandma’s coal-burning stove — thousands of them. Local newspapers then published pictures of morning skies as black as night during the heating season.
However, by 1952 the Asbury wells were flowing natural gas into the city limits and lines for conversion to natural gas wrapped around the block. Fruit orchards switched oil-burning smudge pots to natural gas. Businesses and homes converted to natural gas by the thousands. And the polluting manufactured-gas plant originally located at today’s Greyhound Bus station boarded its windows. Natural gas played an important role in improving local air quality then, and it will continue to do so into the future. Or so we hope.
The latest new swath of regulations proposed by Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission — the third major oil and gas regulation overhaul in six years — have been written for, by and to the benefit of Downtown Denver. These new rules suppose oil wells within Colorado’s brown cloud non-attainment area should be treated the exact same way as a natural gas wells producing in western Colorado, a hundred miles from the nearest town.
This is just sloppy, lazy policy-making and is an example of Denver politicians and political appointees penalizing rural Colorado again and again and again.
But today is a new day. Five Western Slope energy-producing counties joined the fight and are poised to blow the whistle. And rightly so. With local drilling-rig activities falling from nearly 100 in 2008 to four today, taking a rule written for Denver and applying it in rural Colorado represents a bad brand of economic insanity.
These costly regulations will make a bad situation worse in our community by adding yet another cumbersome layer of regulations on our local businesses, regulations that have little to no measurable environmental and/or health benefits.
Members of Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration recently toured western Colorado, making promises to listen more closely to rural issues. They used the phrase “lean in and listen.” Now it’s time to see if the governor’s appointees to the Air Quality Control Commission have a stomach for doing the same.
In the coming months, solid leaders from our Western Slope county commissioners will be asking the Air Quality Control Commission not to institute a Denver-based, one-size-fits-all regulation on our local natural gas companies, just as they did last fall with the Bureau of Land Management and the greater-sage grouse. As they once again stand up, I’ll be standing by their side, doing all I can in making sure Denver’s air problems are not the demise of our local economy.
If the Air Quality Control Commission steamrolls five western Colorado counties and the interests of our rural economy, and if applying regulations statewide meant to control the Denver-area brown cloud, without deference to our rural communities, sets a new precedent, voters should look at the commission and the governor and ask just who appointed these folks?
State Rep. Ray Scott represents Mesa County and House District 55 in the state Legislature. He is a Republican candidate for the state Senate.
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