The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Part 1: A fight brewing in the North Fork Valley
It’s already starting to look like spring at Delicious Orchards outside Paonia, where the snow has mostly melted away and the soil in the Schwartz family vegetable garden is being prepared for seeds. Soon they’ll be opening the gate at the head of the Farmer’s Ditch and flooding row upon row of apple, pear, peach, cherry, apricot and nectarine trees to start the summer growing season.
A similar ritual with soil and water will play out at their neighbor’s farm and the farm beyond that. But there’s growing concern that oil and gas activities upstream could pose a threat to the livelihoods of growers throughout the valley.
Jeff Schwartz farms more than 45 acres of organic temperate fruit trees at Delicious Orchards, which sustains two businesses and two families, employs six full-time and more than 20 seasonal workers, and provides literally tons of fruit for retail, wholesale and processing to people across the Western Slope.
After more than a decade, Schwartz knows the fruit business will wax and wane with the economy or market, but it lives, or dies, by the water, soil and air—they are the lifeblood of any agricultural community.
“From an agriculturalist’s perspective, this oil and gas risk is related to the water and the soil. If you mess with our water and you mess with our soil, we can’t make a living,” Schwartz says. “The biggest threat that I feel over there is oil and gas [development].”
The development and drilling of natural gas wells around Delicious Orchards has picked up the pace in the last decade, as companies have come, or were formed, to tap into a piece of the massive Piceance Basin of methane trapped in rock thousands of feet underground.
Getting at the gas is a dirty business. From a pad, developers drill a hole—often through ground water—into the methane-containing rock. Along with the drill bit goes a “mud,” meant to soften the rock and bring the waste to the surface.
Then a sheath of concrete is poured into the hole to protect the water from what comes next. After the hole is prepared, a cocktail of components—from walnut shells to methanol—is injected into the hole under intense pressure, fracturing the rock and releasing the gas. (For an industry-produced overview of the hydraulic fracturing process, visit www.api.org/policy/exploration/hydraulicfracturing/hydraulicfracturing.cfm.)
Today there are dozens of wells tucked into the hills upstream of the Delicious Orchards farm. For Schwartz, their proximity is scary and the trend of increasing development is even more frightening.
The root of similar fears from a growing contingent of farmers and residents is something Gunnison County has been trying to address with amendments to its Regulations for Oil and Gas Operations. Draft amendments to the document would create some space between gas operations and water bodies as well as require safeguards to limit the potential for pollution and other measures.
The amendment process has been going on for nearly a year. During that time the county Planning Commission has heard from several industry sources that there’s no hard evidence of groundwater contamination from the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
They heard it again from Gunnison Energy Corporation president Brad Robinson at a meeting on Friday, March 11. Robinson quoted Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) David Neslin: “In the state of Colorado, there’s never been a contamination due to fracking.”
Instead, Robinson added, the contamination has always happened as fluid was on its way into or out of the hole, or through human error.
Acknowledging that mistakes do happen, but also that “there are resources in the ground that are valuable and deserve to be extracted,” county attorney David Baumgarten and planning staff have been trying to balance the legal right of developers to exploit the resource with their legal responsibility to protect public health and safety.
Without the scientific expertise to decide what is bad for the public and what isn’t, the county can only try to make sure water and gas don’t mix. According to Baumgarten, the draft amendments are pretty “right down the middle” as local regulations go around the state.
That has drawn the ire of both industry proponents, who think the regulations are too restrictive or burdensome, and industry opponents, who want to see the development stopped until more facts can be established.
SG Interests operations and land manager Eric Sanford told the commission, “I object to the majority of what is in these regulations.” He noted that the industry, while participating in the amendment process, made it clear that they felt well regulated by the state and federal authorities.
On the other hand, planning commissioner David Owen asked if a moratorium on gas development had been considered until the science of its potential for harm can be settled. But the two sides seem to be at a stalemate, with citizens crying foul and industry calling safe. Only recently, through reporting by the New York Times, has the depth of concern over fracking from scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency been made clear.
Schwartz understands the role of industry and the role of government to protect all of its citizens, farmers included, from impacts that would threaten their lives and livelihoods.
“The risk of the coal bed methane development is just too great,” said Schwartz. “We live and die by our water because it’s an agricultural community. People are making a living in agriculture. I think that in a community where a certain percentage of people are making their living in agriculture, there should be a protection against other forms of extractive industry that could risk that.”
The county Planning Commission is moving toward a final draft of the amendment, which they hope provide the protection Schwartz is looking for.
In Part 2, we’ll look a little further into fracking and some of the other processes used in gas development that have been drawn into the scope of the county’s regulation.
