Over 600 Spills in Colorado in 2015

DENVER—Oil and gas companies in Colorado were responsible for 615 oil and other chemical spills in 2015, according to the Colorado Toxic Release Tracker released today by the Center for Western Priorities. The new analysis, which summarizes public spills data from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, finds that 90 spills—or 15 percent of all spills—resulted in water contamination.

According to publicly available data from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission , there were 615 spills in 2015, meaning that nearly two spills occurred every day in the state.

“This is another stark reminder of the risks associated with oil and gas development,” said Greg Zimmerman, deputy director at the Center for Western Priorities. “Even in the face of falling oil prices and virtually no interest in new drilling, companies still managed to spill oil and other chemicals onto Colorado’s land and water nearly two times every day last year.”

The 2015 Toxic Release Tracker finds that produced water was the most common type of spill—companies reported 271 releases of produced water—followed by oil spills, which occurred at least 110 times in 2015. Of those, 51 spills released at least 5 barrels, or 210 gallons, of oil. During 2015, 61 spills occurred within the 500-foot setback of a building.

Source:  http://westernpriorities.org/2016/03/17/new-analysis-in-2015-oil-companies-reported-over-600-spills-in-colorado/

Oil and Gas Well Drilling: "Very Loud, Very Dirty"

This informative half hour video tour shows the industrial scope of a drilling site. The narrator says "It's very loud, very dirty" and "there are lots of ways to get hurt out here". When he's under the platform to show the Blow Out Preventer, or BOP, he says that's a dangerous place to be. 


 


Under the yellow link below, is a video of the Windsor frack water blowout that happened in February 2013. It spewed for 30 hours before it was finally shut off. The Windsor rig used by PDC Energy is not nearly as solid and professional looking as the one shown in the video tour, and perhaps we should be concerned about that! 

• 80,000 gallons of frack water spilled at oil well east of Fort Collins Full story: http://tinyurl.com/lwepzlv

If we cannot stop wells from being drilled, we should at least expect that it is done with top notch equipment to make it as safe as possible. It's usually the smaller operators like Mineral Resources in Greeley that use small, mobile rigs. 

See this one at Island Grove in the summer of 2013