Last weekend I drove up 85 to Greeley for a conference. I knew there was some gas and oil production up there, but to my untrained eyes it looked like a mainly agricultural region.

I drove from the north side of Greeley to Windsor. That used to be a pleasant, uncongested drive through farm country. Now most of those farms and ranches are littered with pinkish-beige storage tanks and there are drilling rigs all over. And the road is crumbling, thanks to all the truck traffic. By the time I got to Windsor I felt like I'd been subjected to a ride in a blender.


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Last edited Mon May 1, 2017, 03:29 PM - Edit history (1)

Dang.

Those feedlots were moved well east of the city many years ago. We still get whiffs, no doubt about it. But the feedlots never went to court to demand more water than agriculture, nor did they assert any right to defile residential neighborhoods and endanger school children.

Moo.


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the old ones are still of concern and new ones not all that far away... Damn.

Worth keeping an eye, to be sure. Especially given that a fracking well's location on the map gives no indication of its underground horizontal reach or direction.


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I live on the Weld County border (when they finally declare war on all us godless liberal commies, my street will be the front line... :eyeroll: ) and the dividing line is stark. On the BoCo side? A few blues - capped, dry or otherwise inactive. On the Weld side - solid red. But it's all the same air. The same water. It leaches through the soil.

We used to live in Brighton, and back then, we knew when weather was incoming because we'd catch the CAFOs on the wind N to S wind. When we moved west 16 years ago, we almost never caught the scent, but over the last couple of years, it's been increasingly common when there's low pressure coming over the Flatirons and high pressure sitting west of I-25. That tells me the concentration of methane (and everything else) is getting higher.

We've got to keep oil and gas on the same zoning footing as every other industry, and we've got to get mandatory pooling off the books. There's no reason O&G are such magical, pretty pony, special snowflakes that they get special rights not available to any other industry.