Public hearing scheduled to amend county regulations for oil and gas

Water body setbacks are focus of final change

The Gunnison Board of County Commissioners finally moved forward in the process of amending the Regulations for Oil and Gas Development, setting a public hearing on the changes for late August.

The final work session came on Tuesday, July 10 after two years of discussion and deliberation from the County Planning Commission to the Board of County Commissioners that has actively involved representatives of the natural gas industry, environmental groups and members of the public.
The last major change made to the amendments at Tuesday’s work session was related to how far oil and gas operations should be set back from water bodies—a persistently unsettled point almost since the discussion began.
Recent meetings between the county, industry representatives and the environmental community yielded a compromise position that was included in the latest draft of the document.
Now gas companies will have an inner buffer of 150 feet they will have to stay out of for the most part, unless they’re installing a new well on an existing well pad or putting something like a pipeline across a creek. There’s also no way out of that restriction for gas companies, who previously had an option of a “technical infeasibility waiver” that could be considered on a case-by-case basis.
The new setback is somewhere between the 300-foot setback recommended by High Country Citizens’ Alliance and the 100 feet asked for by Gunnison Energy Corporation. A second, 500-foot outer buffer could allow some development activity, depending on circumstances at the site.
Proposed amendments related to a comprehensive operations plan (COP), which would allow gas companies to do the big picture planning of large developments early in the regulatory process, was scrapped for this round of revisions. The commissioners agreed the topic should be taken up in the future when more time can be devoted to it.
The concerns expressed by each side of the conversation about the water body setback are based in a muddle of data related to the effectiveness of putting ground between contaminants and water, and how that can prevent the water from being contaminated.
Gunnison Energy Corporation has contended that there isn’t a significant amount of filtration done in 150 feet that isn’t done in 100 feet. To support their point, GUC invited representatives from the widely respected company Wright Water Engineers, which the county has also used for reports in the past.
“Buffers unquestionably are important when it comes to water quality protection,” Wright Water Engineers chief executive officer Jon Jones said. But a 300-foot buffer isn’t twice as likely to prevent spills from reaching a water body as a buffer of 150 feet, he reasoned.
“What the engineering literature tells us is that if you’re somewhere out around 150 feet, you start to have diminishing returns in terms of buffers as they relate to water quality,” Jones said. After 150 feet, he told the commissioners, a sheet of water would form into channels where the water won’t shed pollutants into the soil as easily.
Jones said 50 feet was generally sufficient to filter out most of the contaminants from a gas operation spill, but compounded by a factor of three made the distance that much more effective in filtering spills before they reach the water.
But the gas operations around the North Fork Valley don’t exist in the narrow parameters of a slow moving ground spill and High Country Citizens’ Alliance public lands director Matt Reed pointed out the spill Gunnison Energy reported recently that traveled more than 220 feet to a water body that was consequently contaminated.
“That’s a great distance. All the best practices in the world can be in place but human error and mechanical failures do occur. I think that can trump a decent buffer zone,” Reed said. “I think it’s kind of ridiculous that we’re squabbling over the length of a football field.”
For local gas producer SG Interests, the buffer zone is only a symptom of the problems they have with the entire process of amending the county’s gas regulations, which they started with a request to have the county’s rules fall in line with state requirements. But it was a problem nonetheless.
“For two years almost we’ve thrown these numbers around … but we’re still in the same place … There’s no empirical data to back any of that up … These numbers are political numbers. They’re numbers of convenience,” SG Interests land manager Eric Sanford said.
And he’s going to be there to point out the places where SG Interests thinks the county has gone too far throughout the public hearing process, Sanford said. “I don’t know where all this has gotten us after two years.”
At the same time, Gunnison Energy Corporation president Brad Robinson stood up and put his support behind the amendments to the oil and gas regulations, as well as the process they came out of.
“I understand why the county believes they can [regulate the industry] in order to address site specific concerns and issues in Gunnison County. From our perspective these rules aren’t perfect. But they’re a whole lot better than the preceding ones,” Robinson said. “I disagree with Eric in that I find certainty in these rules. But this is a situation where you should let perfect be the enemy of good. We’ve found some balance here and I think its incumbent on all of us that if these rules aren’t working that we readdress them.”
But before the amendments can be approved by the board, they have to go through the public hearing process, which will start August 28 at 1 p.m. People interested in reviewing all of the amendments can see the entire document on the county’s website, www.gunnisoncounty.org, under the Community Development tab.