Facing millions of dollars in fines, dozens of violations, legions of complaints from homeowners as well as local governments, oil and gas operator Prospect Energy on Wednesday had its right to do business in Colorado canceled.

The Energy and Carbon Management Commission endorsed a settlement agreement between the commission staff and the Highlands Ranch-based company. Prospect Energy also has an agreement with Larimer County and Fort Collins to clean up sites.

As part of the agreement, $1.7 million in ECMC fines will be waived, with what funds the company has going toward securing and cleaning up its sites. Prospect Energy was fined for illegal flaring, spills and failing to do well-integrity tests.

Prospect Energy’s 59 wells will end up in the ECMC Orphan Well program and will eventually be plugged and abandoned by the state.

Under the agreement, Prospect Energy’s owner, Ward Giltner, must obtain commission approval before owning or operating any future oil and gas properties in Colorado. Giltner did not reply to email and telephone requests for comments.

The company, however, still faces $337,000 in fines from the state Air Pollution Control Division for air emission violations. In 2022, the division ordered one of Prospect Energy’s sites closed until dangerous emissions could be curbed.

“This is an exceptional and rare course of action,” APCD director Michael Ogletree said at the time. “This is a unique situation that calls for extraordinary measures to ensure we are protecting public welfare.”

Division inspectors found emissions of volatile organic chemicals and hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs, on repeated visits to the company’s Krause facility tank battery.

“These issues have been going on for more than four years,” said Matt Lafferty, Larimer County principal planner. “The county and the city filed a formal complaint to push the ECMC.”

Prospect Energy operates mainly low-producing wells — 49 in Larimer County and 10 in Fort Collins — and several tank batteries for collecting produced water and oil. The wells date as far back as 1928.

“We have an old, outdated oil field that has seen the end of its life, and I am sure it is hard for owners to let go because they still make a little money,” Lafferty said.

Still, the passage in 2019 of Senate Bill 181, which made protection of public health, safety and welfare as well as the environment the priority in regulating oil and gas operations, has put pressure on small operators and low-producing fields, Lafferty said.

For example, Lafferty said, in 2020 the state adopted rules severely limiting flaring, the practice of burning off gas from oil and gas wells, and it created another violation for Prospect Energy.

“Once that ball started rolling on Prospect Energy, it was clear it didn’t have the resources,” Lafferty said. “Everyone is starting to take action. The snowball got pretty big.”

“This isn’t an oil and gas thing,” Lafferty said “It is a health and safety issue.”

Andrew Klooster, the Colorado field advocate for the environmental group Earthworks, first documented emissions from Prospect Energy, using an infrared FLIR camera, in 2021. Klooster said exasperated residents had contacted his group.

“People were complaining of odors, headaches, nausea,” Klooster said. “Krause tanks had holes in them because they were so old and decrepit,” he said, adding that even when they were replaced, emissions from hatches continued.

“An operator that was not interested in complying”

Klooster said over the years he has made 29 visits to Prospect Energy facilities finding repeated violations, with a big point of concern the Fort Collins Meyer tank battery, where in recent years the Hearthfire development — with homes going for $1 million or more — has been built.

“The refrain the county has been hearing from us and the community is that this was an operator that was not interested in complying with the air quality regulations,” Klooster said.

Meanwhile, ECMC inspectors were also logging a string of problems and began issuing violation notices in 2020. The company racked up 14 penalties adding up to $1.7 million.

Prospect Energy provided the ECMC staff with financial documents showing that it could not pay the fines, Caitlin Stafford, a senior assistant attorney general representing ECMC staff, told the commission.

Commissioner Trisha Oeth said she was “unhappy” with the company completely avoiding paying a fine. Stafford said it is the “hope the operator puts whatever remaining money they have to put the last bit of compliance.”

“It’s not the best outcome,” ECMC Chairman Jeff Robbins said, “but the only likely outcome.”

Prospect Energy still faces the air pollution fines. Under an agreement with the state air pollution division, the company was going to pay in installments, but failed to pay starting in March, according to Zachary Aedo, an agency spokesperson.

“On Tuesday, Aug. 13, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit on behalf of the division seeking compliance from Prospect Energy and its manager Ward Giltner with the terms of the enforcement agreement,” Aedo said in an email.

Under the terms of a separate agreement reached with Larimer County and Fort Collins, Prospect Energy will shut in all its wells and then hire an independent inspector, approved by the local governments, to check that none are leaking.

Any leaking wells will be repaired within 21 days. In addition, the company will remediate a flowline spill in the Country Club Reserve neighborhood east of the Fort Collins Meyer tank battery, and remove the surface equipment there and from the Krause facility to the north within 90 days.

Lafferty said that Prospect Energy hopes to recoup some money by selling off the equipment. He also said that the county’s inspector will participate in the third-party inspection of the shut-in wells.

“It has been a saga,” Klooster said. “Prospect gets out of paying some fines, but for the residents it is worth it for the peace of mind it will bring.”

Rick Aster has spent a career checking up on his favorite patient, the Antarctic ice sheet. Lately, the Colorado State University seismologist is worried about the patient’s weight loss.

A little slimming amid the constant pressure of global warming could be OK — West Antarctica has an unusual rock underlay that could moderate ice melt. Even at the current rate of 150 billion tons of ice per year.

But what Aster and his colleagues have confirmed recently is that Antarctic melting could accelerate in a so-called feedback loop, overflowing the continental rock “bowl” holding in a massive glacier and letting in seawater that will make the ice sheet melt even faster. 

The Antarctic seismology researchers have also learned more about the gravitational pull of all that fragile ice, and how up to now it’s saved much of Earth’s coastline from further disaster. The mass has acted like a magnet, pulling liquid water up and around the Antarctic in a thicker layer than natural sea level would dictate. That kept water levels down at coastal cities to the north, from Miami to San Diego to Honolulu. 

If West Antarctica keeps melting at current rates, this pull is gone, said Aster, co-author of a sea level study published this month in Science Advances. That means even more coastal inundation on the other continents. 

The Antarctic glaciers alone could raise sea levels in North America by 10 feet by 2150, Aster said. Add in the melting glaciers of Greenland, the world’s second largest ice store, and there’s a world of trouble unless humans slow down climate change, Aster said. If we do, the Antarctic’s contribution to rising seas could be limited to just a fraction of that, the new study shows. 

Scientists have sometimes comforted themselves with the knowledge that Earth has been through everything before. The West Antarctic ice sheet was nearly gone in the warm period before the last ice age, Aster noted. Continents survived. 

“What’s really different in terms of today’s global warming, and different than anything that the Earth has seen as far as we know,” Aster added, “is the rapidity of human-caused climate change. We’re spiking the carbon dioxide and otherwise changing the climate so rapidly that we’re in territory where it’s hard or impossible to find natural analogs that we can study in Earth’s past history.”

Geologic time goes by in ticks of thousands or millions of years; climate change time appears to be passing in mere double digits. 

“It’s happening so rapidly that we can see these large effects even in a human lifetime,” Aster said. “And that is something that the Earth has not seen before, as far as we know. So that’s the most stunning thing to me.”

The study directs a spotlight toward global warming in real time. The Earth actually is melting, at an accelerated pace that has geologists accustomed to thinking in 100,000-year blocks now measuring change at the 100-year level. 

Aster and team’s contributions to the study are not directly aimed at ice melt itself, but what happens to the geology underneath underneath when that snowcap disappears. Simplified answer: The rock pushes up under the reduced pressure and slows the loss of ice to the sea. The team found that parts of the bedrock in West Antarctica, the area below South America, are rising at about 2 inches a year as it sheds ice, among the fastest rates on earth.

Wait, that could be good, right? A self-correcting problem? As the seas rise and threaten coastlines, the coastline itself rising up could solve that? Correct, Aster says, but only if the melt is held to a low or moderate level. At the current glacier-gushing rates, the “float” of continental rock can’t keep up with the fast rise of sea water. 

At the higher rates of melt, North America will see its ankles — Miami and New Orleans — inundated within our lifetime unless temperatures are stabilized. 

If humans slow global warming, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet can substantially stay in place and help reduce the worst-case sea level rise attributed to the Antarctic by 40%, the study says. 

“Earth uplift can be our friend and the Earth’s friend, if we don’t ask too much of it,” Aster said. 

After years of harsh critiques from environmental groups and departing co-op members over its slow pace of change, Tri-State Generation is now winning praise for plugging in and planning a host of solar and wind farms to replace dirty coal. 

The Westminster-based utility serving a million consumers through co-ops in four Western states will link to hundreds of megawatts of new solar power by the end of 2025. Its newest five-year building plan was unopposed when filed with state regulators, and wins praise from environmentalists for a wide array of new wind farms and innovative battery storage solutions. 

The big utility, meanwhile, is making it easier for disgruntled member co-ops to accelerate renewable projects they build for themselves outside the Tri-State grid, in one effort to head off more defections like those that turned United Power and Delta-Montrose Electric Association into independents. 

Tri-State is even throwing a technically advanced green wild card into its future studies, saying it will consider an innovative geothermal electricity project in Colorado while seeking “dispatchable” or always-on backup power sources. Before now, most such “dispatch” power fill-ins by other utilities included new natural gas turbines, which emit less greenhouse gas than coal but are still controversial among renewable energy advocates. 

The utility has its eye on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, and if it succeeds, will be well on its way to achieving an 89% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, ahead of state targets. The utility is also getting credit for recent agreements to spend big in supporting economic development in Western Slope communities where it is closing coal plants, which are large employers and vital money engines in small towns. 

“Tri-State should be commended for aggressively pursuing federal funding to support its plan to retire existing coal units and acquire new renewable generation and storage resources,” Clare Valentine, senior policy advisor at the renewable resources nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, said, “all in a way that maintains reliability and delivers climate and economic benefits to member cooperatives and communities.” 

Tri-State’s resource plan for how it will generate power from 2026 to 2031 was filed as an unopposed “settlement” with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, giving it every chance at approval. Now Tri-State will start seeking bids on the projects in its resource plan, and see which ones make economic sense after lucrative federal subsidies are factored in. 

As a nonprofit co-op utility, Tri-State did not qualify for federal tax credits that can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars until a recent rule change. With the change, and the continuing drop in long-term costs to build solar and wind generation, Tri-State can build renewable replacements without blowing up prices for its co-op members, vice president of communications Lee Boughey said. 

Tri-State’s five-year resource plan filed with the PUC starts with construction of a large lithium-ion battery array in New Mexico in 2026, along with a smaller iron-air battery test in eastern Colorado. The advantage of iron-air batteries is they can hold up to 100 hours of backup power, while current battery arrays hold about four hours. Powdered iron rust is charged with generated electricity, turning it back into metallic iron. Exposed to oxygen, the iron rusts again, releasing a steady electrical current that can be sent out on the grid, all employing cheap, environmentally friendly materials. 

The five-year plan also includes a new 140 megawatt solar farm in western Colorado in 2026, and another in New Mexico in 2029. Much of the rest is wind, with five new wind farms proposed to go online between 2026 and 2031 in Wyoming and western Nebraska, eastern Colorado and New Mexico. 

Those are in addition to large solar hookups that are part of Tri-State’s current five-year plan, including 595MW of solar already online in 2024 and finishing up by late 2025. Symbolic of Tri-State’s rapid transition, Boughey said, is the new solar farm that surrounds a closed Tri-State coal-fired plant in New Mexico. 

The schedule for bringing renewable energy online will allow Tri-State to stick to its current schedule of closing coal-fired Craig Unit 1 by the end of 2025, which it co-owns with other utilities; Unit 2 in late 2028; and solely owned Unit 3 on Jan. 1, 2028. Tri-State also plans to close the large 458MW Springerville, Arizona, Unit 3 in 2031. 

The change in the mix would mean that by 2030, 70% of the co-op members’ energy mix will be from clean sources, Tri-State said. In that same year, Tri-State would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions from electrical generation by 89% from the state’s 2005 baseline, the association said. 

Colorado wildlife officials are celebrating some long-awaited good news — the mountain toads are making tadpoles!

For seven years, biologists have been toting tadpoles to high-elevation bogs and ponds in a massive effort to save the inch-long boreal toad. And for the first time at a mountain wetland above Pitkin, they’ve discovered that those transplanted toads are making their own babies in the wild. 

“It’s a really big deal,” native aquatic species biologist Daniel Cammack said in a Colorado Parks and Wildlife news release. 

Boreal toads, which live in wetlands around 11,500 feet and spend their winters buried under multiple feet of snow, have been dying off at a rapid pace across the Rocky Mountain states. A fungus that infects the toad’s skin with a cluster of spores, then bursts and spreads through the water to other toads, is to blame. 

Colorado biologists have been trying to stop the fungus by dipping the tiny toads in a wash nicknamed “purple rain” and have been taking new tadpoles from a hatching center in Alamosa and dropping them in wild ponds. 

This summer, when Cammack went to check on his transplanted toads above Pitkin, northeast of Gunnison, he found they were reproducing, a discovery that Colorado Parks and Wildlife called “potentially game-changing.” 

Cammack’s team has been bringing tadpoles to the wetland since 2018, which is about the length of time it takes for a female toad to reach reproductive age. 

The state wildlife agency has stocked about 20,000 tadpoles at the Pitkin bog, most of which began as eggs that were collected from the backcountry and raised to tadpoles at the Native Aquatic Species Restoration Facility in Alamosa. In 2022, biologists threw in 570 tadpoles from the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance. 

Before the relocation efforts, there were no boreal toads at the Pitkin bog. 

“Everyone who has been involved in this project has poured their heart and soul into it,” Cammack said, calling it a “really special day.”

Now, biologists will watch to see if the tadpoles turn into toadlets and then into adult toads. It will become only the second place in Colorado where transplanted toads have had tadpoles that grew into toads. The first is near Cameron Pass, outside of Fort Collins. 

Boreal toads are the only high-elevation toad in the Rocky Mountains and are an endangered species in Colorado. They live at elevations from 7,500 to 12,000 feet, just below treeline, and hibernate beneath the snow for six to eight months of the year. Researchers say that when the toads are stressed, they release a secretion that smells similar to peanut butter.

The toads were once abundant, even sitting under Buena Vista lamp posts at night in the 1960s to feast on insects that swarmed to the light, according to historical articles reviewed by CPW. Then the fungus came, killing off thousands of the tiny creatures in the 1980s and 1990s. 

The fungus — Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis— is blamed for the death of amphibians all over the world, including in Australia, Asia and South America. Aquatic biologists say the toads lived in Colorado before humans and are an important part of the high-elevation ecosystem, where they eat bugs and serve as food for snakes, birds and weasels. 

In Colorado, some transplanted tadpoles have received antifungal bacterial baths before they are packed into plastic bags and released into mountain bogs and ponds. The wash is called “purple rain” because of its lavender tint.

In one project, University of Colorado researchers injected boreal toads with either a spot of pink or green dye, visible through amphibian skin when they held a toad up to the sunlight. Green-spotted toads got the antifungal bath, while pink-spotted ones did not. Then they tried to capture the toads the following summer, searching for them in a pond above Buena Vista, to see whether they were infected with the deadly fungus. 

A “Boreal Toad Recovery Team,” which includes biologists from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, has been working to save the toads for 20 years. 

“The boreal toad is a truly unique and resilient amphibian,” said Cammack, calling the discovery of the new tadpoles a monumental day in his career. “We are up at 11,500 feet, at timberline practically. They gut out big winters covered by multiple feet of snow and experience only three to four months of warm growing season.”

Colorado River officials in four states, including Colorado, are negotiating a new agreement with the federal government to conserve water and get credit to protect against possible cutbacks in the future.

Water conservation is a big issue in the Colorado River Basin, where prolonged drought, a changing climate and overuse have strained the water supply for 40 million people. Currently, water conserved on a farm simply reenters streams and can be used by anyone downstream. The negotiations aim to set up a program to track, count and store that water so it can benefit the four Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. 

Coloradans have asked for a conservation credit program, and this is a way of addressing that feedback, said Commissioner Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission.

“One of the things that I heard primarily was that we need to be getting credit for the work that we are doing, and we need to be getting credit for it now,” Mitchell said Monday during the commission’s meeting. 

This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.

Farmers, ranchers and other water users are already being paid to cut back their use of Colorado River water. Last year, taxpayers paid farmers and ranchers $16 million to cut their water use through the System Conservation Pilot Program. 

The program led to water savings, but it did not require tracking and storing the water. Theoretically, water conserved in the Upper Basin could simply flow downstream to be used on farms, ranches and cities in the Lower Basin, according to critics of the program.

After years of debating and studying possible water credit programs, the commission ramped up its efforts to set up a program in July.

The commission hasn’t explicitly defined how credits will be used yet beyond saying they will benefit Upper Basin states. One possible use is to save up the credits and use them to fulfill the Upper Basin’s interstate water sharing obligations if river conditions worsen drastically and trigger mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin.

Commissioners and officials from the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the basin’s vital storage reservoirs, aim to draft a conservation-for-credit agreement by the end of September. 

It will identify general criteria for projects that could potentially conserve water for credit, like where conservation is taking place, who can participate, how the program would be regulated and how they plan to calculate conserved water.

If the commissioners approve the draft agreement, they will also have the option to move forward with accepting project proposals. The goal is to have applications in by October and to launch conservation projects in 2025, said Chuck Cullom, the commission’s executive director. 

The process aligns with a highly anticipated funding announcement from the federal government in October, which follows a flood of $450 million in federal funds for environmental projects announced in July.

Establishing a conservation-for-credit program won’t be simple.

Building a long-term program to track and store conserved water raises questions about equity, funding, economic impacts and whether the idea is feasible at all.

The devil is in the details, said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, a public water planning and policy agency that spans over half the Western Slope (which is part of the Colorado River Basin). 

He wants to make sure a future program will not disproportionately impact one region, like the Western Slope. Farmers and ranchers in western Colorado have made nearly all of the water cuts through the conservation pilot program, even though communities across the state use Colorado River water. 

“It’s a complex accounting world, and it takes time,” he said Monday after tuning into the virtual commission meeting along with about 100 other participants. “We do think they’re moving in the right direction.”

The potential program also has to coordinate with a set of high-stakes negotiations among all seven Colorado River states to decide the rules for storing, releasing and cutting back on water in the river’s main reservoirs, like Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These new rules won’t go into effect until after 2026.

Any credits gained before the end of 2026 will be counted but won’t be able to be used by the Upper Basin until after that process is complete, Cullom said. 

The Upper Basin promised to conserve water in a proposal outlining how the four states envision future Colorado River management. Setting up a new conservation program shows the entire basin that the Upper Basin is taking action to cut back on water use, the state commissioners said.

“We all know that we have a supply and demand imbalance in the Colorado River system. We can’t control supply, so the only lever that we have to work with is demand,” said Anne Castle, the federal representative on the commission. “But if we’re reducing demand — and using taxpayer money to do it — then we have to make sure that it’s meaningful.”

A controversial plan to drill up to 166 oil and gas wells near Aurora Reservoir was approved by the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission on Wednesday with the caveat that the operator, Crestone Resources, electrify its operations.

The requirement to electrify the company’s drilling and production operations would cut down on air emissions and noise — two concerns raised by area residents — making the plan “much more approvable from a comprehensive cumulative impacts perspective,” ECMC Chairman Jeff Robbins said.

Crestone, which is a subsidiary of Denver-based Civitas Resources, had submitted a so-called comprehensive area plan, or CAP, for 166 wells on 32,000 acres, including the state-owned Lowry Ranch.

CAPs were added to the state regulations to allow for regional planning and better assessment, and coordination and management of cumulative impacts from large-scale drilling plans.

The Lowry Ranch plan, however, drew strong local opposition. A May commission hearing at the Arapahoe County fairgrounds drew about 300 residents, who gave more than three hours of testimony — almost all in opposition.

When Crestone received an oil and gas lease from the Colorado State Land Board for Lowry Ranch’s 26,000 acres in 2012, there were hardly any homes in the area. Now, there are an estimated 12,000 homes.

Crestone has already drilled and fracked 17 horizontal wells on the ranch and plans to drill the new wells from two existing pads and eight new ones by 2029.

A group of more than 500 residents formed Save the Aurora Reservoir. The group was granted the right to participate in the commission’s hearings as an “affected person” and hired an attorney to make a presentation and question Crestone witnesses.

Jaime Jost, Crestone’s attorney, called STAR “an activist group trying to stop oil and gas drilling in Colorado.”

STAR argued, using expert witnesses, that gaps in the plan left residents unprotected and that it did not properly calculate the cumulative impacts of all the drilling, wells, truck traffic and ongoing operations.

“We are devastated by the commission’s decision,” Marsha Goldsmith Kamin, STAR’s president, said. “This is without doubt the wrong decision for the health, safety and environment of our community.”

Despite STAR’s challenge, the commission found Crestone had substantially complied with the CAP requirements, even as commissioners expressed frustrations with gaps in the plan.

“I still do think that it does meet our rules and is approvable,” Commissioner Mike Cross said. “I hope it would be clear to the operator doing this, that minimum checking the boxes is not what we are looking for.”

Commissioner John Messner disagreed, saying that “on many fronts” the plan lacked the “commitments and evidence” to show that it avoided, mitigated or minimized potential cumulative impacts.

In July, Julie Murphy, the commission’s director, had recommended approval of the drilling plan saying it had met “all applicable requirements.”

Commissioner Brett Akerman voiced concerns about gaps in the plan. “Make no mistake about it, I do think there is an approvable CAP, if not immediately, before us nearby,” he said. Ackerman proposed sending the plan back to Crestone for more work.

Robbins, however, said that the commission could not send the plan — which substantially complied with the state and local regulations — back to Crestone unless it could give the operator detailed guidance on what additions would be required.

Akerman said that one of his concerns was that the proposed line of pad developments — even though well beyond the state’s required 2,000-foot setback — remained “very close to residences.”

The comprehensive area plans are not a final approval, Robbins said. For each well pad Crestone will have to seek approval of an oil and gas development plan, OGDP, and that would be the appropriate time to take up pad location, as well as other issues raised in the hearing, including noise mitigation, fire safety and wildlife protections.

“At this point we are feeling the ECMC is going to scrutinize every one of the OGDPs so we are not giving up,” STAR’s Goldsmith Kamin said. “We are going to keep pushing.”

A sudden-onset drought in northern Colorado helped prime the region’s forests for wildfires, showing how quickly conditions can change even after a “miracle May” of snow.

Colorado experienced a typical snow year, and some regions even saw a favorable bump of precipitation in May. But some of the wettest conditions on record could not stand up to the sudden swing into hot and dry conditions in June and July in northern Colorado. Those conditions laid the foundation for three wildfires that ignited at the end of July, climate and water experts said.

“Sometimes they call these flash droughts, when it turns so radically like that. That’s what we’ve done late in spring and the summer,” said David Barjenbruch, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Boulder. “The lack of precipitation, the dry fuels — all that makes, obviously, a more dangerous wildfire season.”

North-central Colorado, around the Laramie and North Platte river basins, has been enduring the driest period on record since 1893, according to Barjenbruch while looking at the period from May 1 through Aug. 6. During that period, Fort Collins only received 1.64 inches of precipitation. 

This region is the site of the 9,700-acre Alexander Mountain fire, which erupted west of Loveland in Larimer County at the end of July. Leading up to the fire, the area was experiencing low humidity levels — 9% to 11%, Barjenbruch said. 

That’s a big difference from the January through April period, which was the fifth-wettest on record with 6.14 inches of precipitation, Barjenbruch said.

The Laramie and North Platte river basins saw big boosts of snowfall in May, according to Natural Resources Conservation Service records. In fact, the region’s snowpack this year was well above-average, although it melted quickly in the second half of June. Precipitation was 101% of the 30-year median as of May 1.

This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.

The region did not show any signs of drought at the end of April, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. By the end of July, it was in moderate to severe drought.

“Now everything is browned out. The fine fuels are dry. The forest conditions are deteriorating,”  Barjenbruch said. “There’s not as much moisture, which allows fires to grow faster and hotter and spread more quickly.”

Dry weather also laid the foundation for the 1,600-acre Stone Canyon fire, which is 100% contained near Lyons in Boulder County. The area experienced the same sudden onset of drought: It went from the second-wettest period on record for January through April to the driest on record for May 1 through Aug. 6, Barjenbruch said. 

Cooler temperatures, scattered showers and storms are in the forecast for the weekend and next week, which helped fire crews fully contain the Quarry fire in Jefferson County Thursday and should help with the ongoing containment efforts for the the Alexander Mountain. 

Storms can also come with an increased risk of flash flooding, so residents and travelers near the burn scars or in flood-prone areas should stay alert for road closures and local alerts, Barjenbruch said.

A flash flood warning was issued Wednesday afternoon for the Alexander Mountain burn scar near the Big Thompson Canyon after a thunderstorm developed over the area. 

What are conditions around Colorado?

Farmers, ranchers and water managers are closely watching for drought and precipitation as Colorado endures the dog days of summer and the latter half of the irrigation season.

Statewide, the summer has been warmer than usual. This was the third-warmest June on record out of 130 years of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Joel Atwood, a hydrologist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s  Colorado Snow Survey program.

Most of the state saw normal precipitation in June compared with the historical record, except the Laramie, North Platte and South Platte river basins in north and northeastern Colorado, Atwood said. July’s precipitation was below normal across the board. 

These conditions set the stage for other fires around the state, like the 4,155-acre Bucktrail fire, near Nucla in Montrose County.

As climate and water experts get more data about this year’s water conditions, they’re also starting to spot patterns in how the flow of water through streams and rivers matched up with the forecasts based on the snowpack. These streamflow forecasts are vital for water managers as they decide how to store and release water in reservoirs.

In past years, like 2020, forecasted flows were much higher than actual water supplies — a discrepancy that could be explained by different factors, like thirsty soils and plants sucking up water before it can reach streams.

“There are some enigmas to try to understand a little bit better, but I would say that, by and large, it was a fairly average peak runoff season and a fairly well-forecasted peak runoff season,” said Peter Goble, a climatologist for the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University.

One of those enigmas was in southwestern Colorado. Water managers in the Dolores River Basin were thrown a curveball when forecasts for the summer’s streamflows turned out to be much higher than the actual streamflows. 

In early April, the federal forecasts based on monitoring stations in the mountains projected around 200,000 acre-feet of water flowing through the Dolores River Basin. In reality, the basin saw 42% less than the forecast, about 115,000 acre-feet. 

One acre-foot roughly equals the annual use of two to three households. 

April forecasts based on aerial basinwide mapping, which indicated about 116,000 acre-feet of water, helped clue reservoir managers into the discrepancy, according to Airborne Snow Observatories, Inc., which does aerial snowpack monitoring around the state.

Farmers and ranchers who depend on water from McPhee Reservoir were still able to receive a full allocation of water this season. The next big question will be to see how much water can be saved in the reservoir for next summer, according to the Dolores Water Conservancy District.

Looking ahead to the fall, Goble is tracking signs of a La Niña, a climate pattern on the Pacific Ocean which tends to come with warmer and drier conditions in Colorado.

“The developing La Niña is not good news if you’re looking at a more seasonal outlook,” he said.

Colorado environmental groups sued owners of the Suncor refinery in federal court Tuesday seeking a halt to thousands of alleged pollution violations and asking for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. 

The Earthjustice lawsuit for Colorado’s Sierra Club, 350 Colorado and GreenLatinos is the latest in a long series of state, federal and private actions against the Commerce City refinery, which has permits limiting its emissions but which repeatedly settles millions of dollars in fines for continually exceeding those caps. 

The groups say they have logged 9,209 days of potential Clean Air Act violations over the past five years (exceedances of multiple substances in one day count for multiple days). “In 2020 alone, the Suncor refinery emitted approximately 20 tons of hazardous air pollutants, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, 50 tons of nitrogen oxides, 125 tons of particulate matter, 450 tons of volatile organic compounds, and 230 tons of sulfur dioxide,” according to the lawsuit and a press release. 

“Suncor’s pollutants pose an ongoing health threat to the refinery’s neighbors, predominantly communities of color who are more likely to be economically disadvantaged,” Earthjustice said, in announcing the suit. “Residents of neighboring ZIP codes suffer disproportionately from high rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.”

Suncor spokesperson Leithan Slade, in an email response, said the company is aware of the complaint and is reviewing it. 

“Commerce City has been the sacrifice zone for corporations like Suncor for so long, the abuse to my community has been normalized and even expected to happen for Colorado’s economy,” said Renée M. Chacon, a member of GreenLatinos and a Commerce City resident. “No more normalizing this level of cumulative pollution for any community.”

The lawsuit says the Clean Air Act gives citizens, through environmental and law nonprofits if necessary, the right to force stronger action against persistent polluters.

In early July, the EPA and state regulators hit Suncor with another round of pollution violation notices for the past two years. That action came despite a $10.5 million settlement for similar 2021 transgressions that state officials vowed would set the refinery on a path to cleaner operations.

A 140-page summary of alleged new violations compiled by the EPA’s regional office accused Suncor of continued releases of benzene and other toxins into the air and water around the Commerce City plant. The newest complaints, including in some areas the EPA had not pinpointed in previous inspections, restarted criticism from neighbors and environmental groups that small fines have not altered the course of Suncor’s multi-billion dollar business. 

Suncor refines vehicle fuel and airplane fuel at the Colorado plant, the only refinery in the state and one of the few in the West. 

“The Commerce City refinery has been subject to state air enforcement actions by the (state Air Pollution Control Division) annually for at least the past 10 years,” the EPA’s new notice of violations emphasized. 

The July joint notice from the EPA regional office and state regulators was the first step in what may end up as the next round of fines and other penalties for Suncor, which has been the target of similar notices and subsequent negotiations in recent years. The notice asked Suncor to begin meeting with federal and state officials to either challenge the allegations or begin mitigation plans.

The state Energy and Carbon Management Commission cut a key proposed protection for disadvantaged communities facing oil and gas drilling after a sustained pushback from the oil and gas industry, according to environmental groups participating in the rulemaking.

The commission staff Friday issued a new draft of the so-called cumulative impact rules removing a requirement that oil companies seeking to drill within 2,000 feet of homes in a disproportionately impacted community get the approval of those residents.

“The fact that so many in the industry lined up against this shows how big an issue this was and that the ECMC staff completely caved,” said Mike Freeman, an attorney with the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice.

Tearing out that vital protection, which was sought by environmental groups, just a month before hearings begin gives a big advantage to the oil companies, the activists say.

 “It’s really disconcerting,” said Ean Tafoya, director of Colorado GreenLatinos. “The onus was on the companies to do the right thing. It seemed really disingenuous to the work that everybody collectively did to get to that.”

The commission said in a statement to the Sun that “given the vigorous debate on this issue in parties’ prehearing statements, staff decided to provide an alternative in this draft so that parties can provide their thoughts on one or both approaches in their responses.”

The commission said the Aug. 2 draft  includes “robust protections” for residents of Disproportionately Impacted Communities or DICs.

These include a more rigorous analysis of proposed locations near homes, schools and childcare facilities and targeted data for each location and best management practices to limit impacts.

“By requiring this information, ECMC will have a better understanding of community concerns earlier on in the permitting process,” the commission said.

“The fact remains that they removed the 2,000-foot setback requirement from the August draft,” Freeman said.

The state does have a requirement that drilling pads be set back 2,000 feet from homes, schools, child care centers and high occupancy buildings.

But an oil and gas operator can drill inside that buffer if it can show it can provide “substantially equivalent protections” as being 2,000 feet away — such as enhanced recovery systems or zero-emissions equipment — or by getting approval of the homeowners or businesses inside the buffer.

In 2023, 19 of the 71 oil and gas development plans approved by the ECMC were inside the 2,000-foot setback, according to the agency’s 2023 cumulative impacts report. In 2022, 26 drilling plans were inside the buffer.

The proposed cumulative impact rules, set for a hearing in September, initially had a requirement that approval of residents inside the setback was essential — without it, drilling could not start. 

The legislature in 2019 directed the commission to assess the cumulative impacts of oil and gas operations, with particular concern for disproportionately impacted communities —  ones that are low income, of color, have vulnerable populations or have disproportionate environmental burdens.

In an annotated version of the revised draft, the commission staff said the setback provision was cut after “robust stakeholder discussions and feedback in the parties’ prehearing statements.”

In those prehearing statements, Colorado’s top oil and gas producers and the major industry trade groups objected to the provision.

The proposed rule, Chevron Corp. said in its prehearing statement, “would essentially prohibit new oil and gas development within DICs … and should be stricken entirely.”

Chevron went on to say that other parts of the proposed rule, such as requirements for enhanced systems and state-of-the-art technologies, provide “special and robust protections” for the impacted communities. 

On the Western Slope many operating areas are designated disproportionately impacted communities not as a result of environmental issues but because they are low income communities, the West Slope Colorado Oil and Gas Association, a trade group, said.

“These lower income areas often are dependent on oil and gas revenue, particularly for schools and special districts,” the association said. “Allowing one DIC member veto power over new development harms the revenue potential for DICs as a whole and lets the voice of one negatively impact the finances of many.”

The industry arguments are “meritless,” Earthjustice’s Freeman said. “What is really going on here is the industry does not want to have a level playing field with communities so they are getting the commission to do their dirty work.”

The late overhaul of the rules in favor of oil and gas industry demands is a betrayal of a hard-fought compromise in the 2024 legislature, the environmental groups say. Activist groups threatening even more restrictive statewide ballot votes or legislative bills — such as outright bans on new fracking wells, or a mandatory summer “pause” for drilling operations during the worst of the ozone season — agreed to drop their efforts. In exchange, the legislature passed bills capping nitrogen oxide emissions and boosting closures of low-producing oil wells. Greeng groups also got a new per-barrel fee on oil and gas production to be used for transit projects and other pollution reduction. The oil and gas industry said at the time it was giving up its own ballot measures defending natural gas-fueled home appliances. 

While navigating those compromises, both sides were participating in the yearslong rulemaking at the ECMC on cumulative impacts and protections for disproportionately impacted communities. Environmental groups wanted more community protections in part because they’d given up ground in the spring’s “grand compromise.” 

“Environmental justice should require consent,” said Rebecca Curry, policy counsel in the Colorado office of Earthjustice. “They just totally took it out of the rules.” 

The September rulemaking hearings will come at the end of a particularly brutal ozone season. There have been 42 state-issued ozone action alerts so far in 2024, with extremely high temperatures cooking oil and gas and transportation fumes into a stew toxic for human lungs. Distant and Front Range wildfires worsened the ozone and particulate pollution with steady plumes of smoke over the metro area. 

Colorado’s Northern Front Range counties are under an EPA mandate to bring ozone under the 2015 70 parts per billion cap within the next few years, or face more sanctions. Metro area gas stations are already required to sell slightly more expensive reformulated gasoline that is less volatile and creates fewer ozone emissions. Regional Air Quality monitors show the Front Range has violated those EPA standards numerous times already in 2024.

The Stone Canyon fire that destroyed five structures and is linked to one death is 100% contained, leaving investigators to scour the blackened area near Lyons to figure out what caused the blaze. 

Federal investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were looking into the fire alongside Boulder County authorities, the agency said on X. The federal law enforcement agency investigates acts of arson, as well as terrorism and illegal storage of explosives.

The cause of the fire is so far unknown, but the involvement of the ATF indicates authorities suspect it was human-caused.

Local authorities announced Sunday night after completing aerial surveys that the fire was fully contained and that all evacuations and road closures were lifted. It burned 1,557 acres and had not grown in the prior four days. 

“People are just so relieved and grateful,” said Hollie Rogin, mayor of Lyons. “Everyone is hoping to get a little sleep. Of course we are devastated about the loss of homes and the loss of life.”

Rogin and her husband, Patrick, evacuated their home in Lyons last Tuesday after receiving an alert via phone. She grabbed her passport and their two dogs, Pearl and Poncho, and dropped them off at Updog Daycare in Boulder. 

“We found what I think was the last hotel room in Longmont,” Rogin said. 

The mayor said she was touched by the small town’s generosity during the fire, including when the city put out a call for batteries and other donations for the fire crews, who had come from as far as Pennsylvania. Within three hours, there were three pickup trucks full of donated supplies, she said. 

“We really know how to come together when times get tough,” Rogin said. “We saw that during the flood. We saw that during the height of COVID.” 

“At one point we had 250 firefighters in our little tiny town of 2,200 people.” 

The mayor said she expects an extra-large turnout at Wednesday night’s regularly scheduled summer concert series, when people gather to hear music at Sandstone Park. People are filled with relief and gratitude and will want to celebrate, she said. 

“This fire is contained and we are so grateful,” she said, “but I am personally going to be on pins and needles until it snows. I would encourage everyone to have two takeaways — adhere to fire ban rules and be prepared. Have your go-bag ready.”

Meanwhile, fire crews continued to battle two other fires in the Front Range, including the 10,000-acre Alexander Mountain fire in Larimer County, which was 54% contained as of Sunday afternoon. They were also making progress on the Quarry fire, in Jefferson County. 

Rain fell around Denver on Sunday night, bringing some relief to firefighting operations and clearing smoke from the air.

The fires that started last week forced thousands of people from their homes and burned a combined 52 homes and outbuildings. 

In Jefferson County, authorities said the Quarry fire was human caused, but they are not sure yet whether it was accidental or intentional. 

Jefferson County authorities also said Monday afternoon that they were “so close” to allowing evacuated residents to return to their homes but did not want to give a timeline.

“We are very optimistic that we are well on our way to getting people back in their homes safely so they will not have to evacuate again,” said Karlyn Tilley, a spokesperson for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department. “We are very excited that this is going faster than we even thought it was going to.” 

Fire crews worked through the night on a controlled burn that began on the southwest side of the fire and then turned the corner heading north. They were using bulldozers and chainsaws to remove the fire’s fuel  “so that the fire has nothing to eat,” she said. “It’s blowing in the right direction and it’s burning the right things. We are very excited about that.” 

Sunday night’s rain was welcomed by firefighters, but they were hoping for a more soaking rain Monday night, which would speed up the process of allowing residents to return home, Tilley said. Fire crews have been working 24-7 and could use “help from Mother Nature,” she said.

“It’s steep. It’s grueling. It’s hot. They are staying overnight extra hours because they want to get the residents back into their homes.” 

Residents will be allowed to return 48 hours ahead of the people who want to hike on trails in the canyon or drive through the burned area, she said. “We just want to give them a moment to breathe,” Tilley said. 

The fire has burned 527 acres and is at 45% containment. “There will be firefighters throughout this area for weeks to come,” she said. “It is a long, arduous process to make sure there aren’t any flare-ups.”