County delays decision on North Fork flowback pits

Decision expected July 12

Gunnison County is one step closer to granting approval for two applications for centralized water containment ponds, known as flowback pits, to serve an expanding natural gas industry in areas surrounding the North Fork Valley.

At a meeting on Friday, July 1, the Gunnison County Planning Commission unanimously recommended approval of a permit application for Gunnison Energy Corporation (GEC) to build two pits on the Hotchkiss Ranch, near Paonia Reservoir.
The pits GEC is proposing would serve the 16 wells that are permitted in the surrounding four–square-mile area and any that are developed in the future.
“This facility is meant to service all wells in the area. There could be 50 wells, we don’t know,” GEC president Brad Robinson told the commissioners in March. “We’re talking about that four-square-mile area, no matter how many wells it ends up being. You can bet we don’t want to build any more of these [pits] than we absolutely have to.”
At the same meeting, all but one planning commissioner, David Owen, voted to recommend approval of an application from SG Interests Ltd. to build a similar, but larger, facility on the company’s Rock Creek Ranch.
SG Interests’ proposal includes two separate facilities with two pits apiece, capable of holding more 1.6 million gallons in the smallest of the pits and as much as 7.4 million gallons in the two largest pits, known as the McIntyre Pits 3 and 4. Those pits, along with the smaller McIntyre Pits 1 and 2, will serve the water containment needs for the entire 32-square-mile Bull Mountain Unit.
According to both companies, the pits have a lot of advantages, like reducing truck traffic and adding security during the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process, when an unknown amount of “produced water” will come back out of the well bore. In addition to holding the produced water, the pits will also be used to mix the water with concentrated fracking fluid.
“As it turns out, that water is good for our [fracking] process, so we want to use it, reuse it and maybe use it again,” GEC director of environmental and permitting Lee Fyock explained.
Both applications include two pits because both companies would like the added capacity of an additional pit should they need it, to store additional produced water or if there is a weather-related event that threatens the security of the ponds, like excessive rainfall or a landslide.
However, according to the companies and their consultants, the pits are built for a worst-case scenario with liners several layers thick and leak detection systems in case the liners fail, which they are expected to do.
“Liners do leak and they will,” GEC consultant Weston Solutions geologist Dan Brennick told the commissioners. “The system is designed for mitigation.”
Robin Smith, chairman of Citizens for a Healthy Community, a Paonia-based organization trying to protect “people and their environment from irresponsible oil and gas development,” isn’t convinced mitigation should be the goal.
“When you go through a process like this you realize how regulations [meant to manage the development] are so stacked against citizens and stacked in favor of the gas industry and it is virtually impossible to stop anything,” Smith says. “The way the regulations are, there is hardly a leg to stand on in which to stop it, and that is incredibly disappointing.”
But the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners wasn’t ready to commit to anything after receiving the Planning Commission’s recommendation the day they were scheduled to review it.
“I heard from a third party that it was on our agenda today and I was surprised, to be honest with you, because of the holiday weekend…,” commissioner Hap Channell said. “I am not in any way, shape or form ready to respond to this recommendation at this point in time.”
The commissioners will consider the recommendation at a meeting on July 12.