“Peggy was more than a friend. She was a fierce protector of this valley, a tireless advocate for our land, our air, our water, and our future. Through her writing at From the Styx, she gave voice to the voiceless, held the powerful accountable, and shone a light on issues many would have preferred to leave in the shadows. She proved that one voice, clear and unshakable, can ripple through an entire community.

But Peggy was not only a champion for the environment—she was also a champion for people. She was the kind of friend who listened deeply, who stood with you in the hardest moments, who believed in truth and integrity no matter the cost. Her courage was matched only by her kindness.

Peggy loved this place—the rivers, the mountains, the quiet forests—and she knew they were worth fighting for. She reminded us that stewardship of the earth isn’t a task for someone else, it’s a responsibility we all share. She made advocacy personal and urgent, but also hopeful.

I will miss Peggy’s sharp wit, her unwavering principles, and the warmth of her friendship. Yet I know her legacy continues—every time we raise our voices, every time we stand up for what is right, every time we look at this valley and remember that it is sacred and worth protecting.

Peggy leaves us with a challenge and a gift: to keep watch, to keep speaking, to keep caring as fiercely as she did. May we honor her not just in words, but in the work we carry forward.

She was a fierce voice for truth, a friend to the earth, and a giver of light in darkness that will be missed beyond words. Rest in power, Peggy.”
~Anita Sherman

Human emissions drove the megadrought in the western US

“Our results show that the drought and ocean patterns we’re seeing today are not just natural fluctuations — they’re largely driven by human activity.” — Jeremy Klavans, postdoctoral researcher in CU Boulder’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and lead author of the study

Greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions from human activity have been driving the prolonged drought in the western United States through a complicated connection with the Pacific Ocean, according to a new CU Boulder-led study.

For more than two decades, an extreme dry spell has drained the Colorado River, devastated local farms, and intensified wildfires across the American Southwest. The new prediction, published August 13 in Nature, could help water managers region develop better water use plans or invest in infrastructure accordingly, with relief potentially still decades away.

Human emissions drive recent trends in North Pacific climate variations

Worst drought in 12 centuries

The drought hitting the Colorado River Basin states and California is directly linked to a climate pattern of the north Pacific Ocean, known as the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

The PDO is a natural fluctuation of the Pacific that waxes and wanes every two decades or so. In its positive phase, waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean along the U.S. West Coast tend to be warmer, whereas waters near Japan are colder. In its negative phase, the pattern flips, bringing cold water to the eastern Pacific.

Since the 1990s, the PDO has been stuck in a negative phase, an unusually long stretch for a typical cycle, Klavans said.

That has had profound impacts on the United States. The cold air and water along the U.S. West Coast hold less moisture than warm air, causing a reduction in precipitation. This extended cool phase also pushed storms that would have brought water to the region farther north.

As a result, scientists estimated that about 93% of the western United States is experiencing drought, with 70% facing severe dry conditions. Prior studies have shown that the past two decades have been the driest in the American Southwest in at least 1,200 years.

Scientists had long thought that the PDO was entirely determined by natural forces, such as the heat exchanges between the ocean and the air. Even the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of experts convened by the United Nations, said the PDO is controlled by natural forces with high confidence.

If that theory was correct, the PDO should have flipped from negative to positive in 2015 after a strong El Niño event warmed the Pacific.

Instead, the PDO shifted positive for a short time following the El Niño before reverting to the negative phase again.

New reality

To understand why the PDO has been stuck, Klavans and his team used a large collection of climate simulation programs to predict what would happen in the future.

Using a new suite of over 570 simulations, the team found that between 1870 and 1950, changes in the PDO were almost entirely driven by internal forces. But since the mid-20th century, greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions have accounted for more than half of the variations in the PDO.

The team discovered that existing climate models tend to overestimate the role of internal factors on the PDO while underestimating the influence of external factors, such as emissions. After correcting the imbalance, the team found that emissions, and their impacts on the PDO, have been responsible for nearly all of the precipitation decline in the western United States over the past three decades.

“People have been trying for a long time to find out why this part of the country is so dry, and we have an answer for that finally,” Klavans said.

Because the same imbalance has been shown in other regions, Klavans said the study’s implications could go far beyond the Pacific. For example, the North Atlantic Oscillation, a similar fluctuation over the Atlantic Ocean, is driving drought in places like Spain. He added that improving climate models to capture the role of external forces could help scientists predict future changes in precipitation across the globe.

As for the American Southwest, the outlook is grim. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the PDO will likely remain in its negative phase, and the drought will persist for at least the next three decades, Klavans said.

“With this information, water planners could set new expectations and make proper investments in water infrastructure now, knowing this drought is here to stay,” Klavans said.

For example, some Californian cities are already building desalination plants to turn seawater into drinking water.  

“This study can allow us to better quantify the costs of continued greenhouse gas emissions for Americans,” Klavans said. “That can only help our region plan for a better future.” 

Human emissions drive recent trends in North Pacific climate variations

Can Colorado recycle toxic water from oil and gas drilling without increasing emissions?

Environmentalists fear the answer is “no,” as regulators determine how to permit more produced water recycling facilities in disadvantaged communities.

Story by Jake Bolster, photos by Lee Pruitt

(This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.)

The vegetation along the Colorado River as it runs next to Interstate 70 is lush in early June, soaking up the tail end of this year’s meager spring runoff as it makes its way West. 

But as you approach Rifle, Colorado, splotches of dry grass begin popping up on the slopes above the river’s southern bank. In the second half of the 20th century, oil shale companies began moving into the small town and “bought up the ranches for the water rights,” said Leslie Robinson as she looked out across the river from a well pad near her home. “Oil and gas gets water first,” she said.

Since Robinson, an environmental advocate, moved to Rifle over 50 years ago, she has witnessed the boom and bust of extractive industries on the state’s Western Slope, where they devour local economies and natural resources when times are good, then turn away when prices fall. 

“When you live in Rifle, you can’t escape it,” she said. “It’s all about energy.”

The use of freshwater in oil and gas drilling has been the subject of intense scrutiny in Colorado lately amid a deepening, decades-long drought and a forecasted increase in demand from the industry. Oil and gas extraction currently uses less than one percent of the state’s freshwater, but even that amount gets mired in controversy.

This March, Colorado’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC), which regulates the oil and gas industry, passed new rules requiring drillers to recycle more of their wastewater — a caustic, brackish and chemically laden byproduct of the drilling and fracking process known as “produced water.” The new rules were set in motion by HB23-1242, passed in 2023, which requires oil and gas extraction companies to use more recycled water, but do not address another key provision of the law: the increased recycling of produced water cannot cause more oil and gas emissions, which can contain CO2, methane, benzene, a known carcinogen, and other volatile organic compounds. 

Regulators across the state are trying to figure out whether meeting one requirement of the new law requires violating the other.

A few yards from where Robinson was taking in the Colorado River, Andrew Klooster, a Colorado field advocate with Earthworks, an environmental nonprofit, was pointing what looked like a small movie camera mounted on a tripod at large beige tanks. The two were doing an annual checkup on oil and gas wastewater infrastructure along the Interstate 70 corridor to better understand how it emits gases into the atmosphere.

Oil and gas companies usually accumulate wastewater in pits or large cylindrical tanks before either trucking or piping it to a recycling facility or an injection well that can store it underground. Both recycling the water and storing it underground can produce emissions. 

“We know that the produced water waste stream does generate emissions and does generate potentially a lot of emissions,” said Klooster, who has spent years monitoring oil and gas sites in Colorado using an optical gas imaging camera, a machine capable of rendering invisible vapor plumes visible to the human eye. 

To increase produced water recycling in Colorado, oil and gas companies will need to store more produced water, which means more pits, tanks, pipelines, trucks and recycling facilities. 

“How you do that without creating more of an emissions problem is really, really hard to figure out,” Klooster said, as he and Robinson began what they call their “toxic tour.”

“They haven’t really demonstrated as an industry their ability to even store and transport the produced water without emissions,” he said.

Oil and gas companies are not required to control emissions from produced water in certain scenarios.

As produced water storage tanks or pits sit in the sun, the liquid they hold heats up, building pressure in the container. Over a certain threshold, operators must take steps to destroy these emissions, typically by burning them off in a process called “flaring” that releases less harmful gases into the atmosphere, a practice regulated by the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE). But if an operator calculates that a facility releases less than 2 tons of emissions annually, they may vent them freely and do not have to take steps to reduce them. 

And to further complicate the tradeoffs involved with controlling both emissions and produced water, as part of HB23-1242, the legislature said that no new centralized produced water facilities may be built in “disproportionately impacted communities” –census blocks where at least 40 percent of households are low income, or areas where multiple factors “affect health and the environment and contribute to persistent disparities.”

This definition includes areas of Colorado’s Western Slope, like Rifle, and parts of the Front Range on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, where communities living with a boom in oil and gas drilling are saddled with unhealthy air and are grappling with similar concerns to those found farther west. 

“I still currently, if I’m being honest, struggle with what causes less harm,” said Harmony Cummings, the director of the Green House Connection Center, an environmental nonprofit in Denver. “This is what the industry keeps saying back to us: Do you want to have thousands of [truck] trips? Or do you want to have a treatment facility?” Given the poor air quality in the front range, oil and gas companies may struggle to build new produced water storage facilities there, she added.

Oil and gas companies have argued that building more produced water recycling infrastructure will help them avoid emissions. But without an exemption to the prohibition on produced water facilities being built in communities already disproportionately impacted by economic and environmental hardships, Western Slope companies say they will be forced to use more emissions-intensive truck trips to increase produced water recycling elsewhere.

“Storage tanks with controls and pipelines make a difference in lowering air emissions from produced water,” particularly by lowering a company’s reliance on truck trips, said Kristine Mize-Spanksy, an integrity management & GIS supervisor at QB Energy, in a statement to Inside Climate News. “Well-designed and properly managed produced water handling and storage systems can significantly increase recycling rates with negligible impact on air emissions.”

Klooster and Robinson appreciate Colorado’s desire to limit pollution, and the two are heartened when an operator takes steps to mitigate emissions they have spotted. Nonetheless, they worry the state has drawn up a set of regulations that could be impossible to implement without either increasing emissions, or saddling some communities with more produced water recycling infrastructure — or both. 

“I don’t want them to drill any more of these or to develop any more of these processing plants in [disproportionately impacted communities] … which includes this whole valley. And it’s not just impacting people, but water and animals and the environment,” Robinson said. “There’s going to be leaks.”

Living alongside extractive industries

Robinson came to Rifle in 1975 to work in the nearby outdoor economies of Glenwood and Aspen, then fell in love with the area and decided to build a life here. She held a marketing job with a local media company and worked for the U.S. Census Bureau before retiring in 2008 and becoming head of the Grand Valley Citizen Alliance, an environmental activist organization.

Today, Robinson’s sandy gray hair frames engaging, playful eyes. She has a quick sense of humor about monitoring oil and gas infrastructure in a community with an economy dependent on the fossil fuel industry.

“I don’t think oil and gas worries about me [and Klooster] running around [with a camera],” she said. “But we’re mosquitoes, and it makes the bear stop and swat.”

As Colorado regulators drafted rules for produced water recycling, Grand Valley Citizen Alliance and other environmental groups advocated for regulations to prevent produced water being exchanged between basins. Recycled produced water in the Piceance basin, the oil and gas formation where Rifle is located, accounted for 92.26 percent of the water used to frack new wells there in 2022. That figure was only 0.4 percent for Front Range producers, according to a state report, because those companies do not have a robust recycling network and tended to use freshwater to drill. Environmentalists were concerned that the difference could create a market for companies to send water from the Western Slope to producers in the eastern plains of the state.

“We were able to accomplish that,” Robinson said of new regulations preventing water sharing between basins. “Not much more.”

Robinson delivered that assessment from a county road about 10 minutes from her home, at a gas well owned by Terra Energy Partners, which is doing business in Colorado as TEP Rocky Mountain. The well pad backdropped by hulking tan cliffs of the Roan Plateau was the first stop on her tour with Klooster, who aimed his camera at the tanks as Robinson spoke. 

He was pretty sure he could see emissions coming off the hatches on one of TEP’s storage tanks — one he and Robinson had filed a complaint about before — but due to the direction of the wind and his proximity to the vent (Klooster is oftentimes confined to public roads when making his assessments), he was having difficulty rendering a clear image.

Klooster’s camera, which he estimates costs about $100,000 to purchase and learn to use, cannot differentiate between any of the compounds in the vapor it visualizes. Nor can it quantify the volume of the gas it picks up. Instead, Klooster’s camera can offer residents, environmental organizations and regulators evidence to show a company whether their equipment is functioning properly.

Andrew Klooster records emissions from TEP infrastructure in 2023.

To get an air permit under Colorado law, operators perform calculations on the potential emissions from a piece of equipment or site. They can use CDPHE equations, or develop their own using CDPHE-approved sampling methods. If companies forecast that equipment or facilities will release less than two tons of volatile organic compounds annually, they aren’t required to control those emissions.

Klooster was eventually able to make a clearer picture of the emissions, and later filed a complaint with the CDPHE’s Air Pollution Control Division (APCD). In two previous complaints, filed by Robinson in August and September of 2024, the company told regulators that the hatches were either dirty or being repaired at the time of Klooster’s videos. In both cases, TEP told the state it had applied a fix and reevaluated the facility with an OGI camera, and the emissions had stopped.

But this time in response to Klooser’s footage, an APCD employee emailed to tell him that TEP had a permit for uncontrolled emissions from that facility, and the equipment was working as designed. “There is no way for me to require them to make any repairs in response to observed emissions,” the employee wrote.

APCD later informed Klooster that the facility “became not subject to [leak detection and repair] and tank control requirements between 2023 and 2024,” signaling to Klooster that the company had calculated its emissions from the site to be under two tons per year. 

“Operators are trying to convince the public that they are doing everything they can to control emissions. The reality is they are doing everything they are required to do, and in this case, they are claiming they are not required to do anything.”— Andrew Klooster, Earthworks

Klooster has also filmed emissions coming off TEP pipeline infrastructure elsewhere on the Western Slope. 

TEP did not return multiple requests for comment. 

Mize-Spansky, a supervisor at QB Energy, said that “gas leaks, blowdowns or other releases from produced water pipelines are rare.”

Klooster worries that the current permitting system makes it more difficult to accurately assess emissions from produced water facilities and leaves operators little incentive to do so. 

“If you are supposedly not emitting enough to control emissions but you are also exempt from being forced to address leaks, why should we have faith that you are actually emitting below the [two tons per year] threshold?” he wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. “Operators are trying to convince the public that they are doing everything they can to control emissions. The reality is they are doing everything they are required to do, and in this case, they are claiming they are not required to do anything.”

“CDPHE is working in conjunction with the Colorado Produced Water Consortium to further research the emissions generated by the recycling of produced water,” said Leah Schleifer, a communications and outreach specialist with CDPHE, in an emailed response to questions about whether the agency was considering amending its air permitting process in light of Colorado’s push to limit produced water emissions. “These efforts are ongoing.”

Andrew Klooster used this footage to submit a previous complaint to the state.

More pipes or more trucks?

In a drab white conference room back in Rifle, members of the Colorado Produced Water Consortium, a body of 31 people including regulators, industry representatives, environmentalists and scientists, gathered two days after Robinson and Klooster’s toxic tour to learn about the intersection of produced water infrastructure and communities already disproportionately impacted by environmental and economic challenges.

Earlier that day, the group had gone on a tour of infrastructure led by Western Slope producers. Klooster and Robinson were not on the tour, but they came to the conference room to submit comments alongside county officials and representatives from Western Slope oil and gas companies, including Mize-Spansky.

In their presentation to the consortium, oil and gas company representatives said that their network of tanks, pipes and pits on the Western Slope grew out of consultation with communities that requested a decrease in truck traffic decades ago, and helps reduce emissions. The approach is also driven by costs and “doing the right thing,” Mize-Spansky said. 

If companies could no longer build produced water recycling infrastructure near new well pads on the Western Slope they would revert to using more trucks. Mize-Spansky estimated one truck would make over 3,000 trips just to prepare one well for production. “Think of the emissions and driving safety risks from all those trucks,” she said.

But with gas prices low, Robinson and others have wondered how much more drilling will happen in the basin.

In her statement to Inside Climate News, Mize-Spansky noted that truck trips are still effective “when the resource needs to move in small quantities, infrequently or in remote areas.”

“We’ve got twenty years of history out here recycling. We want to continue to do that,” Mize-Spansky said. “We’re very concerned that the prohibition [on new centralized produced water recycling facilities in disproportionately impacted communities] is going to push us to change our operations.”

Emissions from trucks carrying produced water may be greater than those that escape from tanks and pipelines.

“The more you keep [produced water] closed up and under some pressure, the better off you are,” said Seth Lyman, an environmental scientist at Utah State University who studies emissions from produced water ponds in Utah’s Uinta Basin. Lyman noted that there has been less research quantifying emissions from produced water sitting in a storage tank or moving through a pipeline, but he still felt that installing more of that infrastructure would lead to an increase in emissions.

“Any oil and gas operation is going to have some emissions, and so you can expect that any increase in operations will increase emissions to some extent,” he said.

During the meeting, Klooster gave a presentation about his concerns with produced water storage tanks and pipelines using videos he had made surveilling TEP infrastructure.

Shawn Brennan, an environmental manager at TEP, said that the company makes monthly trips to sites to monitor equipment, and that TEP fixed some of the leaks shown in Klooster’s videos. “Some things change, seals fail. It’s why we go as frequently as we do,” he said. “We’re not perfect, but we’re doing our best to minimize fugitive emissions.”

Regulatory beginnings

The Produced Water Consortium met again in August to discuss draft recommendations to the ECMC about how the state could responsibly site produced water recycling facilities in disproportionately impacted communities.

They tentatively planned to recommend allowing new produced water recycling infrastructure in disproportionately impacted communities only if “enhanced protections” were implemented for the community. The recommended protections included increasing setback distances for new facilities, requiring companies to submit an alternative site, mandating enhanced emissions capture and control, prioritizing pipelines to reduce truck trips and engaging with communities and local governments earlier in the siting process. 

Robinson was dismayed. “We’re dissatisfied that there would be any discussion of produced water facilities in disproportionately impacted communities,” she said. While Robinson said Grand Valley Citizen Alliance has not figured out what to do next, she does expect this issue to be before the legislature next year. “I think the battle lines are already being drawn politically,” she said.

The rules have not been officially approved by the consortium, and ECMC commissioner John Messner did not rule out future legislation to address the issue, either. “This is not the only bite at the apple,” he said.

Regulators elsewhere in the state say they have only just started deliberating the issue. Trisha Oeth, an ECMC commissioner and chair of the Produced Water Emissions Workgroup, said determining a baseline for emissions and whether and how emissions could change as a result of increased produced water recycling was the group’s first task.

“We in this working group are taking this one step at a time, really trying to get a good understanding of what is happening with the operations, what would change and what does that look like for air emissions?” she said.

Oeth hopes to have recommendations for the ECMC ready by the start of 2026, when operators must begin meeting produced water recycling thresholds, and added that, depending on what the working group finds, they may not need new rules. Her group would not have the power to change how CDPHE regulates air permits for oil and gas facilities, she said, and Oeth declined to speak about what might happen if Colorado determines it cannot keep emissions from rising along with produced water recycling rates, as the law requires.

Produced Water Emissions Workgroup meetings are not open to the public.

“It is kind of a lose-lose situation,” Klooster said. “This whole premise is really just a means to help continue to develop new wells in Colorado, but just not use as much freshwater while doing it.”

Robinson likened Colorado’s effort to balance oil and gas fresh water consumption and community concerns alongside efforts to limit emissions to a test. “There’s not a good answer. I mean it’d be C, none of the above, you know? Forget about the whole oil and gas industry.” If a similar level of regulatory willpower and private-sector dollars were put elsewhere in the economy, particularly into clean energy, “imagine how far we’d be,” she added.

The Lee fire raging nearby had eclipsed 100,000 acres by Aug. 11, but Robinson was preparing that day for a county commissioner meeting on permits for 39 new TEP wells about five miles from the home that she might have to evacuate.

“The oil and gas situation across the board just never ends,” she said.

New analysis shows waste emissions charge delay will cost taxpayers over a billion in lost funds

Delay would make up just 0.2% of the total production revenues of reporting companies in 2023

When President Trump signed the “big beautiful” spending bill into law on July 4, 2025, it included a provision officially scuttling the nation’s methane waste emissions fee for the next 10 years.

Waste Emissions Charge (WEC) is an overwhelmingly popular policy that was designed to affect only the worst performers in the oil and gas industry, encouraging them to instead avoid the charge by improving their air emissions performance to industry best practices. But while oil and gas trade groups in Washington worked feverishly to gut the measure, the elimination of the fee overwhelmingly benefits just a handful of companies.

New analysis from Gas Leaks estimates the decade-long delay of the methane WEC will cost the U.S. government nearly $1 billion in lost revenue in 2026 alone. However, more than half of that lost revenue benefits just 10 oil and gas companies, and by far the top beneficiaries are ConocoPhillips, Caerus Oil & Gas, Diversified Energy, Hilcorp Energy, and BKV Corporation.

Even worse, this pollution bailout is being handed to some of America’s most profitable corporations. Our analysis finds that more than 80% of the projected fees would have been paid by companies with over $100 million in production revenues in 2023, and nationally, the projected fees would have made up just 0.2% of total production revenues of reporting companies.

Estimating based on the most recent reported emissions data [more on our methodology below], our analysis projects that methane pollution fees would have totaled $582 million for 2024, $776 million for 2025, and $971 million for 2026. And instead, we estimate this delay effectively greenlights over 640,000 metric tons of excess methane emissions annually, with the equivalent climate impact of operating 14 coal power plants a year, or driving 13 million passenger cars.

 “The data showing that the billion-dollar-plus loss to taxpayers would only be a drop in a bucket gain to the oil and gas industry is a blatant slap in the face to every American,” said Geoff Bromaghim, a spokesperson for the BigGasPolluters coalition. “Even worse, this analysis shows how the Trump administration provided a free pass to a handful of the worst-performing oil companies to continue polluting far above industry best practices. This is a horrible outcome for taxpayers, and even worse for the health of downwind communities.”

The fee was designed to curb methane pollution from the fossil fuel operators that continue to perform below industry best practices and was projected to bring in $7.2 billion in revenue over the next decade. The analysis shows that the largest polluters, ConocoPhillips, Caerus Oil & Gas, Diversified Energy, Hilcorp Energy, and BKV Corporation, are now given a free pass to dodge tens to hundreds of millions in fees. While Big Oil lobbied heavily against the WEC, calling it “duplicative” with EPA’s new methane regulations, it is now cheerleading the Trump administration’s efforts announced on July 29th to also undermine the EPA’s methane rule. 

Other key takeaways from the analysis include:

• More than 80% of projected fees would have been paid by companies with over $100 million in production revenues.
• Nationally, the projected fees would have made up just 0.2% of the total production revenues of reporting companies in 2023.
• The delay greenlights over 640,000 metric tons of excess methane emissions annually, with the equivalent climate impact of operating 14 coal power plants a year, or driving 13 million passenger cars.

Big Gas Polluters Coalition announces Hilcorp Energy as August’s Polluter of the Month

Hilcorp has the distinction of continuing to rank as the #1 methane polluter in the U.S. oil and gas industry, while its excessive pollution incidents have generated headlines from New Mexico to Alaska to Ohio.

“When it comes to corporate polluters, Hilcorp is the worst of the worst,” said Josh Eisenfeld, Earthworks Oil and Gas Research and Accountability Manager. “Their historic levels of pollution have been harming the health and climate throughout Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming since 1989. Hilcorp is the poster child for why national rules to cut methane are necessary to protect all people in the US from Hilcorp’s harm. Rather than fixing their equipment to control pollution, Hilcorp has spent its time and money lobbying the Trump administration to deregulate the rules.”

Over the last several years, methane pollution hunters, certified thermographers from Earthworks, have compiled video evidence identifying otherwise hidden pollution from over 100 Hilcorp oil and gas facilities. In New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, where Hilcorp is the largest operator and nearly 80% of the population lives within a ½-mile radius of active oil and gas operations, recent reporting details how kids in the area “just keep getting sick”.

Hilcorp is also a top beneficiary of the recently delayed Waste Emissions Charge, according to an analysis from a member of the Big Gas Polluters Coalition. It found that the pollution fee’s decade-long deferral will cost the U.S. government nearly $1 billion in lost revenue in 2026 alone, primarily benefiting just ten companies.

About Big Gas Polluters

BigGasPolluters.org was launched to provide credible, evidence-based information on the claims and actions of the fossil fuel industry. Included in the effort is a database documenting reported methane emissions, commitments made to reduce methane, evidence of leakage events from Earthworks, and more information about the 100 largest oil and gas companies in the US. It has never been more critical to fact-check claims regarding climate pollution, and Big Gas Polluters is here to monitor methane pollution, hold the industry accountable, and serve as a resource in these uncertain times.

Click here to receive updates from Big Gas Polluters

Recently retired Colorado scientist Lisa McKenzie chased the link between fracking and adverse birth outcomes, cancer and cardiovascular disease

By Jennifer Oldham

(This story was originally published by Capital & Main)

Public health researcher Lisa McKenzie remembers her first aerial view of the landscape-altering impacts of fossil fuel production on the picturesque mesas that rim the western slope of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

“It was well pad, after well pad, after well pad,” said McKenzie, a recently retired associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health. “I remember thinking to myself, that’s like 7,000 point sources of benzene.”

The marred panorama altered the trajectory of her work. Since the 2010s, she’s leveraged her background in environmental chemistry and epidemiology to lead seminal studies that quantified the health effects of an oil and gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Her research transformed how drilling is regulated nationwide.

Fracking, which forces water, sand and chemicals into the earth to crack shale and release fossil fuels, helps energy companies plumb deposits miles underground. Since its widespread adoption this century, wells have multiplied and moved closer to populated areas from California to Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Pennsylvania.

Today, a majority of Americans oppose fracking, according to an October Pew Research Center survey. Drill pads proposed on the fringes of several fast-growing suburbs led some Coloradans to ponder whether the scientific literature is now at a tipping point, like that of tobacco research, at which there is conclusive evidence to prove fossil fuel extraction harms human health. McKenzie and her peers, some of whom she inspired to research public health impacts of the industrial process in other states, think it is.

“There is starting to be enough evidence to say that living near oil and gas wells, in these areas with a lot of oil and gas development, may have health consequences,” McKenzie said, “particularly for the most vulnerable populations,” like young children, fetuses and older people with heart issues.

There is consistency of results across multiple studies that were conducted using different methodologies in various states and time periods and among diverse populations, providing heightened confidence in the body of research, she added.

Her work is pivotal to this sea change. It’s included in compendiums published in California and New York that span hundreds of pages. The pioneering scientist reflected on her extensive body of research and its impacts as she prepared for her retirement last month. Scientists she’s mentored call her humble, meticulous and brave — her studies have been publicly criticized by state health officials and the oil and gas industry.

And even with her retirement imminent, state oil and gas regulators took notice in June of several recent studies she co-authored as a reason to create a new panel of experts to evaluate recent public health research on the impacts of fracking.

“This would be an opportunity for the authors of these studies to present their study methodology and findings,” said Trisha Oeth, a commissioner with the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission. “I think ultimately this would help me understand the key takeaways.”

The first of many key public health takeaways for McKenzie came in the early 2010s when she co-authored among the first studies to quantify the potential for fracking to make people sick.

Her work stemmed from a request by Garfield County officials that the Colorado School of Public Health study whether air pollution from the oil and gas wells that were encroaching on neighborhoods could impact residents’ health. McKenzie was the lead author on the project.

The first-of-its-kind study garnered national attention after it appeared in 2012 in the peer-reviewed journal Science of the Total Environment.

Its novel findings triggered a congressional field hearing that month in Denver. In the ornate Old Supreme Court chambers in the state Capitol, McKenzie told members of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources that her team “estimated higher cancer risks for residents living nearer to wells as compared to residents residing further from wells.” Benzene, a known carcinogen, “is the major contributor to lifetime excess cancer risk for both scenarios,” she testified.

McKenzie recommended that regulators reduce air emissions from oil and gas development. And she capped her six pages of written testimony by listing the limitations of her research and issuing a call for further study.

Earliest empirical evidence

Scientists nationwide took notice of this paper and others McKenzie authored in 2014 that used birth records to research connections between birth outcomes and proximity to oil and gas development. She and her colleagues found that children with congenital heart defects were more likely to be born to a mother who was living in the densest areas of oil and gas development.

“Her studies provided some of the earliest empirical evidence suggesting associations with outcomes like adverse birth outcomes and pediatric cancer risks,” said Nicole Deziel, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, who has authored papers with McKenzie and who cited her research in testimony in 2023 before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. “Her work also helped shape how exposure is conceptualized in this field.”

Outside academic circles, McKenzie’s findings gained traction in political campaigns. Celebrities including Daryl Hannah, Lance Bass and Hayden Panettiere cited her work in a video that called on U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), then Colorado’s governor — to “ban fracking.” The video was later repurposed to target state officials across the country.

Residents used her studies to advocate for tougher rules on oil and gas pollution. As pressure built on officials, Colorado’s chief medical officer, Dr. Larry Wolk, said in a statement that McKenzie’s 2014 study “did not consider the effect other risk factors may have played” and “the findings showed only association, not causation.” Her team pointed out these limitations in their paper.

Trying to isolate which pollution sources contribute to health impacts is a tricky endeavor. Most of McKenzie and her peers’ work talks about “associations” between energy extraction and acute conditions or chronic illnesses because it’s difficult to single out one environmental contributor. And proving causation is another matter altogether.

“We almost can never do the gold standard of epidemiology, which is a randomized control trial, and that’s because first, we can’t put people in laboratories,” said the scientist from her office on the University of Colorado’s Anschutz campus, “and second, we really don’t expose people to things we know are going to harm them to see what will happen.”

The quandary didn’t stop McKenzie from continuing to ask questions about how thousands of new wells fracked in Colorado each year are impacting the health of residents.

In the last 14 years, her peer-reviewed studies found associations between the intensity of oil and gas exploration and congenital heart defects and neural tube defects, childhood cancer and early indicators of cardiovascular disease among residents nearby.

She and colleagues also found that home values were lower for residences closer to wells. They built on previous research in a study from early 2018, based on an air sampling campaign conducted by state and federal agencies that estimated far higher lifetime excess cancer risks, as well as other health risks, for residents living nearest fossil fuel pads.

What makes McKenzie’s research unique is her pairing of what’s known as exposure monitoring — or the measurement of a community’s exposure to air pollutants or other environmental stressors — with detailed health assessments, said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of Washington who has co-authored with the Colorado health researcher.

McKenzie also collaborated with Meagan Weisner, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, on a 2023 study of residents in Broomfield, a municipality north of Denver, that found that people living within one mile of oil and gas pads reported headaches, respiratory and gastrointestinal effects and nosebleeds more often than those living more than two miles away.

“She’s very pragmatic in the way she approaches research — she says, ‘We may find nothing, and there may be no correlation between oil and gas and these symptoms,’” Weisner said. “That’s not what we found.”

Regulators rein in oil and gas development

McKenzie’s push to expand the scientific understanding of how oil and gas pollution is associated with illness reverberated nationwide.

“I have little doubt that Lisa’s research contributed significantly to the ban on hydraulic fracturing in the state of New York — it was a meaningful part of the compendium released by Physicians for Social Responsibility at the national level,” said Lauren Swain, coordinator for the group’s Colorado chapter.

“The state of Vermont also banned fracking, Maryland essentially banned fracking, and fracking is banned along the Delaware River in multiple states,” she added.

In Colorado, the rare June decision by state regulators to convene a panel to meet directly with public health researchers underscores the widespread impact of McKenzie’s research on how states hold energy companies accountable today.

Public health advocates and residents in Colorado credit her work with raising awareness among regulators about the need to curb air emissions from oil and gas production, account for the cumulative impacts of all pollution sources when considering drilling permits, and to protect disproportionately impacted communities.

This shift culminated in a 2019 law that changed the mission of the state’s oil and gas agency from fostering energy development to prioritizing public health, safety and the environment. Today, regulators say they issue fewer drilling permits because of the tighter standards on energy companies.

“In Colorado, you almost can’t do any oil and gas rulemaking without her research coming up,” said Weisner. “She influences the overall scope of how we look at things.”

As McKenzie’s studies in Colorado built upon one another, California’s oil and gas regulator invited her and other scientists in 2020 to review the public health implications of fossil fuel development.

After synthesizing hundreds of pages of scientific research that quantified the public health impacts of oil and gas drilling, the California Geologic Energy Management Division found for the first time a “causal relationship between close geographic proximity” to such wells and “adverse perinatal and respiratory outcomes.”

In a 523-page report released by the panel in 2024, McKenzie is cited 81 times. Researchers who joined her on the panel, several of whom have co-authored studies with her, said her contribution to the current understanding of how oil and gas development impacts residents’ health was pivotal to the enactment of California’s toughest-in-the-nation setback rules. The panel’s work informed a 2022 law that requires that wells be set back 3,200 feet — more than half a mile — from residences.

“Absolutely, Lisa’s work was used as a backbone of that legislation,” said the University of Washington’s Casey. “It’s also been instrumental in giving community members scientific data they need to back up their intuition on what’s going on with oil and gas extraction and their health.”

Fierce pushback from oil and gas industry

In May, the scientist gave community members something more to work with when she co-authored a paper in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. The study found that Colorado children diagnosed with “a type of cancer of the blood and bone marrow were more likely to live near oil and gas well sites than children who were free of cancer.”

As a result, McKenzie and her colleagues suggested that a state law that requires that oil and gas development be set back 2,000 feet from residences may not be sufficient to protect kids’ health.

The paper, like most of her work, drew fierce pushback from the oil and gas industry. “By its own admission, the report fails to establish any causal connection between childhood leukemia and oil and gas production,” according to a story in Energy in Depth, a website established by the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

In an interview, McKenzie said that the study considered the overall density of oil and gas sites that emit air pollutants like benzene, a known carcinogen. She added that she and her colleagues lacked data to say how much of the contaminant toxin children were exposed to and could not conclusively say what caused leukemia.

McKenzie added that she gauges the validity and impact of her work by the number of times her peers cite it in their research. Indeed, tallies kept on Google Scholar show that her 2012 Garfield County study has been cited 853 times, and her 2014 birth outcomes study 425 times.

And her most recent first-of-their-kind findings didn’t stop there. A second peer-reviewed study published last spring in Environmental Health Perspectives — on which McKenzie advised — revealed emissions reductions practices that oil and gas operators are required to undertake at well pads in Colorado are failing to protect people living nearby.

The paper concluded that for communities near fossil fuel extraction sites “acute health risks persist after the implementation of best management practices to reduce emissions.”

“The risks surpassed Environmental Protection Agency thresholds during production — that’s not something that has been really studied,” said the EDF’s Weisner, the paper’s lead author. “Risks were assumed to be during pre-production and fracking.”

Researchers recommended that regulators establish policies that require energy companies to drill and frack wells outside of what’s known as “ozone season,” the period between May 31 and August 31 when lung-damaging pollutants become trapped in the Denver basin.

Nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds emitted by vehicles and oil and gas operations react with the region’s plentiful sunlight to create ground-level ozone. Inhaling such pollution can exacerbate asthma and other respiratory conditions, particularly for children and older adults.

Cities along the eastern flank of the Rockies routinely rank among the worst in the nation for this pollution, which so far has prompted health officials to issue 23 public health alerts warning residents to reduce time outdoors since May 31. The state has failed for years to meet federal clean air standards.

Worsening air pollution and an expanding number of fracking projects on the cusp of suburban communities provide opportunities for researchers to continue to study the impacts of such industrial development on residents’ health.

And even though McKenzie is retired, she plans to continue consulting. She’s not done asking questions about how air emissions from intensifying fossil fuel development affect millions of people who call the eastern edge of the Rockies home.

Copyright 2025 Capital & Main

By Lisa McKenzie and Nicole Deziel, The Conversation

Acute lymphocytic leukemia is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in children, although it is rare. It begins in the bone marrow and rapidly progresses.

Long-term survival rates exceed 90%, but many survivors face lifelong health challenges. Those include heart conditions, mental health struggles and a greater chance of developing a second cancer.

Overall cancer rates in the U.S. have declined since 2002, but childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia rates continue to rise. This trend underscores the need for prevention rather than focusing only on treatment for this disease.

A growing body of literature suggests exposure to the types of chemicals emitted from oil and natural gas wells increases the risk of developing childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia.

We are environmental epidemiologists focused on understanding the health implications of living near oil and natural gas development operations in Colorado and Pennsylvania. Both states experienced a rapid increase in oil and natural gas development in residential areas beginning in the early 21st century. We’ve studied this issue in these states, using different datasets and some different approaches.

2 studies, similar findings

Both of our studies used a case-control design. This design compares children with cancer, known as cases, with children without cancer, known as controls. We used data from statewide birth and cancer registries.

We also used specialized mapping techniques to estimate exposure to oil and natural gas development during sensitive time windows, such as pregnancy or early childhood.

The Colorado study looked at children born between 1992 and 2019. The study included 451 children diagnosed with leukemia and 2,706 children with no cancer diagnosis. It considered how many oil and natural gas wells were near a child’s home and how intense the activity was at each well. Intensity of activity included the volume of oil and gas production and phase of well production.

The Colorado study found that children ages 2-9 living in areas with the highest density and intensity wells within eight miles (13 kilometers) of their home were at least two times more likely to be diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. Children with wells within three miles (five kilometers), of their home bore the greatest risk.

The Pennsylvania study looked at 405 children diagnosed with leukemia between 2009 and 2017 and 2,080 children without any cancer diagnosis. This study found that children living within 1.2 miles (two kilometers) of oil and natural gas wells at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia between ages 2 to 7 than those who lived farther than 1.2 miles away.

The risk of developing leukemia was more pronounced in children who were exposed during their mother’s pregnancy.

The results of our two studies are also supported by a previous study in Colorado published in 2017. That study found children diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia were four times more likely to live in areas with a high density of oil and natural gas wells than children diagnosed with other cancers.

Policy implications

To extract oil and natural gas from underground reserves, heavy drilling equipment injects water and chemicals into the earth under high pressure. Petroleum and contaminated wastewater are returned to the surface. It is well established that these activities can emit cancer-causing chemicals. Those include benzene, as well as other pollutants, to the air and water.

The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. There are almost 1 million producing wells across the country, and many of these are located in or near residential areas. This puts millions of children at increased risk of exposure to cancer-causing chemicals.

In the U.S., oil and natural gas development is generally regulated at the state level. Policies aimed at protecting public health include establishing minimum distances between a new well and existing homes, known as a setback distance. These policies also include requirements for emission control technologies on new and existing wells and restrictions on the construction of new wells.

Setbacks offer a powerful solution to reduce noise, odors and other hazards experienced by communities near oil and gas wells. However, it is challenging to establish a universal setback that optimally addresses all hazards. That’s because noise, air pollutants and water contaminants dissipate at different rates depending on location and other factors.

In addition, setbacks focus exclusively on where to place oil and natural gas wells but do not impose any restrictions on releases of air pollutants or greenhouse gases. Therefore, they do not address regional air quality issues or mitigate climate change.

Furthermore, current U.S. setback distances range from just 200 feet to 3,200 feet. Our results indicate that even the largest setback of 3,200 feet (one kilometer) is not sufficient to protect children from an increased leukemia risk.

Our results support a more comprehensive policy approach that considers both larger setback distances and mandatory monitoring and control of hazardous emissions on both new and existing wells.

Future research

More research is needed in other states, such as Texas and California, that have oil and natural gas development in residential areas, as well as on other pediatric cancers.

One such cancer is acute myeloid leukemia. This is another type of leukemia that starts in bone marrow and rapidly progresses. This cancer has exhibited a strong link to benzene exposure in adult workers in several industries, including the petroleum industry. Researchers have also documented a moderate cancer link for children exposed to vehicular benzene.

It remains unclear whether benzene is the culprit or if another agent or combination of hazards is an underlying cause of acute myeloid leukemia.

Even though questions remain, we believe the existing evidence coupled with the seriousness of childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia supports enacting further protective measures. We also believe policymakers should consider the cumulative effects from wells, other pollution sources and socioeconomic stressors on children and communities.

LNG projects awaiting final investment decision do not stand up to U.S. Government analysis

In December 2024, the Biden Administration’s Department of Energy (DOE) published a long-awaited update to the agency’s analysis of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The multi-volume analysis, termed the 2024 LNG Export Study, represents the most comprehensive government assessment to-date of the energy, economic, and environmental impacts of U.S. LNG exports.

As the Trump administration barrels forward with its pro-fossil fuel agenda, and European and Asian governments and financial institutions debate whether to increase investments in U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects, a report published this month by Greenpeace USA, Earthworks, and Oil Change International highlights the climate threats and financial risks posed by five major new liquefied gas export projects proposed for the United States Gulf Coast, all but one of them still awaiting a final investment decision.

The report analyzes five major U.S. LNG projects — Venture Global CP2, Cameron LNG Phase II, Sabine Pass Stage V, Cheniere Corpus Christi LNG Midscale 8-9 [1], and Freeport LNG Expansion — and finds that each and every one fails a “climate test” derived from models in the Department of Energy’s (DOE) 2024 LNG Export public interest studies. Contrary to industry claims, the report shows that decreasing methane venting and leaking during gas drilling, transportation, and liquefaction is not enough to make these projects “climate neutral.”

“What we found was crystal clear — any further investment in LNG is not compatible with a livable climate,” says Andres Chang, Senior Research Specialist at Greenpeace USA and lead author of the report. “The massive growth in infrastructure along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast has already created significant public health and ecosystem impacts, threatening entire coastal communities. But it doesn’t stop there. We believe this report shows that if built, these projects would put global climate goals even further out of reach.”

Report highlights:

• Major proposed LNG projects would fail to achieve the “climate neutrality” benchmark put forward by a 2024 federal analysis (“2024 LNG Study”) to inform the review of LNG export applications under the Natural Gas Act.
• As a result, pending LNG export applications appear to be inconsistent with the U.S. public interest and would drive up global greenhouse gas emissions. This finding is robust across policy/technology assumptions that the U.S. government included in the 2024 LNG Study.
• Even if major steps were taken to clean up the gas supply chain, U.S. exports would be inconsistent with the 1.5ºC climate goal. This is because LNG expansion drives up energy demand and displaces renewable energy in importing markets, according to the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) that underlies the government study.
• LNG projects are a risky investment. They take years to build and decades to pay off, and the Natural Gas Act authorizes the U.S. government to rescind export authorizations that are deemed inconsistent with the public interest.
• LNG expansion harms communities and working families. The massive growth in LNG infrastructure along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast is already having significant public health impacts, and threatening coastal communities and ecosystems in the process.

“Focusing the Department of Energy’s model on individual US LNG terminals that are yet to be built, we found that they all result in increased greenhouse gas emissions because they pollute the climate, displace renewable energy, and drive up gas demand,” says Lorne Stockman, Oil Change International Research Director and report co-author. “It is very clear that governments, investors, and insurers must stop supporting the reckless LNG buildout now and instead invest in a rapid and just transition to renewable energy that will protect our communities from toxic pollution and climate-fueled superstorms.”

Future administrations could revoke export authorizations that were rubber-stamped under Trump based on their failure to pass the DOE “climate test,” which introduces a new layer of uncertainty to these already-risky projects. This report adds to a rapidly growing body of evidence that financing U.S. LNG is not a sound decision for insurers, investors, or purchasers — something the EU and America’s Asian allies must keep in mind as President Trump pressures them to increase their imports of U.S. LNG under threat of sweeping tariffs. 

“Countries with climate commitments, such as those in the EU, should be very wary of the climate cost of importing US LNG,” says Dr. Dakota Raynes, Senior Manager of Research, Policy, and Data at Earthworks and report co-author.

This report adds to a rapidly growing body of evidence that financing U.S. LNG is not a sound decision for insurers, investors, or purchasers — something the EU and America’s Asian allies must keep in mind as President Trump pressures them to increase their imports of U.S. LNG under threat of sweeping tariffs.

“Fossil fuel dependency has long externalized its true costs, forcing communities to bear the burden of pollution, sickness, and economic instability,” says James Hiatt, founder and director of For a Better Bayou. “For decades the oil and gas industry has known about the devastating health and climate impacts of its operations, yet it continues to expand, backed by billions in private and public financing. These harms are not isolated — they’re systemic, and they threaten all of us. This report is a call to conscience. It’s time we stop propping up deadly false solutions and start investing in a transition to energy systems that sustain life, not sacrifice it.”

Read the report:  Failing the “Climate Test”

Key findings and recommendations

Trump Administration used bogus “energy emergency” to rubberstamp expansion of Utah crude oil transport facility

Abbreviated environmental review will lead to a dramatic expansion of the Wildcat Loadout Facility

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced on July 3 that it has completed an “accelerated environmental review process” and approved a significant expansion of the Wildcat Loadout Facility near Helper, UT. The facility is used to transfer Uinta Basin crude oil from tanker trucks to rail cars. The expansion is intended to push an additional 80,000 barrels of crude oil per day traveling on train tracks along the Colorado River, raising the risk of oil spills and other accidents.

Prior to the approval, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser wrote to the BLM:

“Because the proposed right-of-way expansion threatens the safety of Colorado’s land, air, and water, I urge BLM to undertake a more thorough environmental assessment that includes opportunities for public comment and other stakeholder involvement under the agency’s regular NEPA procedures.

“ … the proposal could dramatically increase the amount of oil transported along the River to up to 140,000 barrels of oil per day by 2026, compared to the current volume of 42,000 barrels per day These oil trains would run directly along sensitive and critical waterways and ecosystems, including the Colorado River — Colorado’s most critical water resource — and its headwaters as well as the Fraser River and Arkansas River …

The threat of accidents, derailments, and oil spills places these critical water sources at risk of contamination and poses other major health and safety risks to nearby communities including with respect to wildfires and explosive materials … BLM is improperly and unnecessarily preventing the public from providing input about the project’s reasonably foreseeable effects, increasing the chance that important environmental impacts from the proposal will be overlooked and unmitigated, and subjecting Colorado communities to significant economic, environmental, and health and safety risks.”

The review, which provided no public input opportunities, was initiated in response to the “National Energy Emergency”  declared by President Trump in January 2025.

The Wildcat project proponent (Coal Energy Group 2, LLC) initially submitted an application to the BLM for the expansion in 2023. But BLM put the expansion on hold for two years because the applicant failed to provide the agency with the necessary information needed to evaluate it. The agency has offered no explanation for why this long-dormant project, one delayed by the proponent’s own actions, is suddenly an “emergency.”

“There is no energy emergency, plain and simple. Hidden behind a shroud of secrecy, the BLM has rushed through its approval of this massive oil shipping expansion project,” said Landon Newell, Staff Attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). “This thinly analyzed decision threatens the lifeblood of the American Southwest by authorizing the transport of more than one billion gallons annually of additional oil on railcars traveling alongside the Colorado River. Any derailment and oil spill would have a devastating impact on the Colorado River and the communities and ecosystems that rely upon it.”

Coal Energy Group 2, LLC is seeking to reconfigure its current facility to add new infrastructure, including adding unloading areas, an oil tank farm, loading systems, and related facilities. This expansion will increase the site’s capacity to move oil from tanker trucks to rail car by more than one billion gallons annually.

“The Trump administration’s refusal to hear community concerns about oil spill risks is pure hubris. D.C. bureaucrats do not know better than local communities how this dangerous increase in oil trucking and rail traffic will affect their health and safety,” said Wendy Park at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This fast-tracked review breezed past vital protections for clean air, public safety and endangered species.”

Oil will be transported in trucks to the facility through the narrow Indian Canyon from the Uinta Basin, where it will be trans-loaded onto railcars at Wildcat. Those railcars will travel east along the Union Pacific line, where, for over a hundred miles, the tracks roughly parallel the Colorado River, the source of water for more than 40 million people across the West.

The BLM’s rushed decision also caught Colorado lawmakers off- guard. U.S. Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO-2) had called for a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the proposal expansion:

“The Bureau of Land Management’s decision to fast-track the Wildcat Loadout expansion — a project that would transport an additional 70,000 barrels of crude oil on train tracks along the Colorado River — using emergency procedures is profoundly flawed. These procedures give the agency just 14 days to complete an environmental review — with no opportunity for public input or administrative appeal — despite the project’s clear risks to Colorado.

There is no credible energy emergency to justify bypassing public involvement and environmental safeguards. The United States is currently producing more oil and gas than any country in the world. We strongly oppose BLM’s use of emergency authority in this case and urge Secretary Burgum to suspend this process and conduct a full Environmental Impact Statement that gives Coloradans a voice in decisions that directly affect them.”

UPDATE — June 24, 2025

A provision mandating the sale of federal public lands across the West, including in Colorado, cannot be included in the Republican budget bill, the Senate’s parliamentarian has decided. Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled late Monday that the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management property falls outside the scope of the rules for the Republican-drafted reconciliation bill. That means proponents of the sale must either attempt to rewrite the provision so it fits Senate rules or drop it from the budget bill. Conservation groups cheered the development Tuesday morning. “This is a victory for the American public, who were loud and clear: Public lands belong in public hands, for current and future generations alike,” Tracy Stone-Manning, the president of the Wilderness Society, said in a statement.

“While the fight isn’t over, we’ll keep using every tool to protect our public lands!” Colorado’s Rep. Joe Neguse posted on the social platform X, formerly known as Twitter. On Monday night, Lee announced major changes to his proposal, including eliminating all Forest Service land from possible sales. He also said he would limit the BLM land available for sale to parcels within a 5-mile radius of communities. “Yes, the Byrd Rule limits what can go in the reconciliation bill, but I’m doing everything I can to support President Trump and move this forward,” Lee said on X.2

The Senate’s nonpartisan referee has ruled against GOP attempts to use reconciliation to mandate public lands sales and to allow gas exporters to pay for expedited approvals, Democrats said. Why it matters: Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough’s rulings mean those Energy and Natural Resources Committee provisions would be subject to the Senate’s typical 60-vote threshold, dooming their passage in the reconciliation process. Selling public lands is a chief priority of ENR Chairman Mike Lee, but other Republicans have staunchly opposed the idea. MacDonough, in overnight rulings, rejected several sections of bill text that ENR proposed this month, according to Senate Budget Committee Democrats.

Bill updated June 14; millions of acres of specially designated lands on table to meet sales mandate

A public land sale mandate included in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s budget reconciliation bill could draw from over 250 million acres’ worth of roadless forests, wilderness study areas and other public lands, according to new analysis from The Wilderness Society.

Bill language released by the committee on June 11 mandated disposal of 2-3 million acres of public lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, with few restrictions. By initial estimates, more than 120 million acres were eligible for sale to meet that mark. But updated bill text leaked on June 14 expanded the inventory of lands available, more than doubling the previous estimate. Notably, the June 14 language appears to allow the sale of lands with grazing permits, which had been exempted from the prior version.

The Bill: Energy and Natural Resources: Subtitle A — Oil and Gas Leasing

Though Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Mike Lee painted the disposal mandate as only affecting “isolated parcels” of “underused” land, the new data make it clear that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is set to open up bidding on an enormous swath of outdoor recreation areas, wildlife habitat and other areas in order to meet an arbitrary sales quota — all so the Trump administration can lower taxes on the richest people in the country.  

“From the moment public land sales originally made it into the House budget reconciliation bill via shady last-minute amendment, it has been clear lawmakers know such proposals are deeply unpopular. Public land sales only have a prayer of being signed into law if they’re hidden or misrepresented to the American people in some way, which is why Mike Lee has been depicting this as an effort to lightly trim our Forest Service and BLM lands at the margins,” said Michael Carroll, director of the BLM program for The Wilderness Society. “Our data confirm that, in fact, the lands being put on the auction block in the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ cover a wide variety of recreation trails, wildlife habitat and other special places. Now, we find out that Lee and his allies changed the language of the bill to include lands available for livestock grazing too, jeopardizing ranching operations across the West. The communities that love and rely on these public lands deserve a full accounting of what’s at stake and an acknowledgment that once these lands are sold off, they will never get them back.”    

However, the Salt Lake Tribune on Wednesday quoted Jordan Roberts, the Senate committee spokesperson for Lee, as indicating the proposal could be in for further changes, as Winter also suggested.

“Senator Lee greatly respects and understands the vital connection between public lands and the livelihoods of hardworking ranching families,” Roberts said in a statement reported by the Tribune. The committee “is currently finalizing updated text for the reconciliation package that specifically addresses these concerns to ensure that grazing uses are protected and supported,” Roberts said.

Lee has said the measure opens “underused federal land to expand housing, support local development and get Washington D.C. out of the way of communities that are just trying to grow.”

Key takeaways about lands eligible for sale in Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee text:

• The bill mandates arbitrary disposal of between 2.02 million-3.04 million acres of BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands in 11 states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming) over the next five years.
• In all, more than 250 million acres will be eligible for sale under the June 14 version of the bill (see table below). The legislation exempts certain federally protected lands like national wilderness areas from potential disposal, but it leaves many administratively designated lands on the table.
• The sell-off provision in the bill would leave tens of millions of acres of lands with wilderness characteristics, wilderness study areas, areas of critical environmental concern and inventoried roadless areas eligible for sale.
• Though national monument lands are exempted from the disposal provision in the bill, an opinion issued by the Trump Justice Department last week argues the president can revoke national monument protections. If the administration acts on that unprecedented and legally dubious finding, it could render an additional 13.5 million acres eligible for sale.
• The bill’s process for selling off lands runs at breakneck speed, demanding the nomination of tracts within 30 days, then every 60 days until the arbitrary multi-million-acre goal is met, all without hearings, debate or public input opportunities. It gives the secretaries of the interior and agriculture broad discretion to choose which places should ultimately be sold off.
• The bill sets up relatively under-resourced state and local governments to lose open bidding wars to well-heeled commercial interests. It also fails to give sovereign Tribal Nations the right of first refusal to bid on lands, even for areas that are a part of their traditional homelands or contain sacred sites.

Click here for interactive map

Chris Winter, executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a white paper Wednesday that while the provision language could be subject to further change, its failure to include a definition of a valid existing right raises “the likelihood that areas subject to a grazing permit could be available for sale.” He said federal courts have found that grazing permits are licenses rather than rights.

The Senate committee provision could end up in a sweeping Senate budget reconciliation bill. The House has passed a reconciliation bill without a public land sales provision.

U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, R-Grand Junction, had voted in a committee against the inclusion of a public-land sales provision in the House reconciliation bill. Last week, U.S. Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, both D-Colo., and some Democratic U.S. House members from Colorado spoke out against the proposal in the Senate.

Winter wrote in his white paper, “By giving the land management agencies a mandate to complete widespread sell-off of federal public lands with few if any meaningful criteria or guardrails, this proposal reflects a historic change in the nation’s policies for retaining public lands and managing them according to multiple use, sustained yield principles. It would set a dangerous precedent that would undermine the rule of law.”

In a statement Soren Jespersen, director of the Colorado Wildlands Project, said, “The seriousness of this proposal for Coloradans can’t be overstated. This isn’t just an attack on public lands, it’s an attack on Colorado’s identity, economy, and way of life. Our public lands are the reason so many of us moved here and why so many never leave. If Senator Lee and Donald Trump get their way, we might as well replace the iconic green mountains on Colorado’s license plate with a gated mansion and a locked gate — because that’s the future they’re selling.”

He said the proposal also is the reason permanent legislative protections are needed for areas such as the Dolores River region and other areas proposed for such protections in Colorado.

“Many of the places targeted in this proposal are areas that Coloradans have fought to protect for decades and under this reckless plan, they’d be on the auction block,” he said.

Colorado Chevron well suffers blowout, community left in dark

By Cassandra Ceballos
Earthworks Energy Communications Associate

When holes are drilled into the ground to frack and extract fossil fuels, no one and nothing is safe. There is no such thing as a “clean” or “carbon neutral” oil and gas operator. From the very beginning, drilling for oil and gas creates a “forever problem” that puts communities and ecosystems in danger.

The residents of Galeton, a rural town in Weld County, Colorado, became intimately acquainted with the risks of the fossil fuel industry when, on April 6th, Chevron’s “Bishop” Well suffered a catastrophic blowout. A blowout is an uncontrolled geyser that releases waste water, chemicals, crude oil, and other byproducts of fracking into the air and environment. In this case, millions of gallons of this toxic combination spewed unabated for almost five days before finally being contained.

So severe was this blowout that harmful greenhouse gases such as methane, and cancer-causing toxics like benzene, were detected up to two miles away from the wellhead, according to researchers from the Colorado State University. Benzene was found in concentrations 10 times the federal chronic exposure level. Methane was found at 20 parts per million. The federal exposure level acceptable for human health for ill effects not to occur? 9ppm. Dozens of other chemicals were also detected, including “trade secret” fluids, some of which are known to contain another harmful toxic, formaldehyde.

These are just the airborne impacts documented. The droplets from the geyser themselves also wrought havoc.

The damage is unprecedented, and cannot be overstated:

• One person was severely injured as a direct result of the geyser.
• Over a dozen households were contaminated and multiple families evacuated.
• The local elementary school closed for weeks, impacting its 100+ student body.
• It will take an estimated five years, if not longer, to completely clean up.

While the full extent of the harm is still unknown, and clean up numbers are still being tallied, one thing is abundantly clear: this was the worst oil and gas incident in Colorado in recent history. The other top 4? All since 2020. Colorado Public Radio reports that:

• In 2020, the largest oil spill in the database occurred when a fire burned several storage tanks in Lincoln County, incinerating 1,200 barrels of oil.
• Also in 2020, the largest oil spill by barrels of oil recovered, when an “unauthorized person” opened a valve in Washington County & the operator recovered 340 barrels.
• In 2022, the largest incident by barrels of produced (or contaminated) water recovered – 8,000 barrels.
• In 2023, the largest produced water spill in state history, when 13,000 barrels of produced water spread across the ground in Las Animas County as a result of equipment failure.

What’s scarier is that Colorado actually has some of the strongest rules in the country to protect health, communities and the environment from harms of the oil and gas industry. Despite these good-on-paper regulations, a major failure still happened.

If it can happen in a state with what should be some of the toughest protections, if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. When holes are drilled into the ground to frack and extract fossil fuels, no one and nothing is safe. Oil and gas infrastructure near communities is always a recipe for potential harm and disaster.

Reposted with permission