when the smell and sounds of the tank battery

Julie Boyle and her husband plan to move away from Weld County as soon as they can.

Not because of finances. Not because of better opportunities. They’ve just had enough of their neighbors — 20 oil and gas facilities that surround their home north of Gill.

“We’re outta here,” said Boyle, who plans to move to their second home in Lyons as soon as finances permit in the next year or two.

Boyle is a hardy member of the newly formed Weld Air and Water, a group of residents advocating for health and safety amid oil and gas exploration in the county.

She can’t definitively point to oil and gas for the increase in nosebleeds she’s had in the last year. She also can’t say the industry and the nearby wells and tank batteries are the sole reason for her increased sinus problems in the last five years.

But she said she also can’t discount the connection when the smell and sounds of the tank battery near her house chase her out of her garden or off her bike route.

“I’m pretty convinced this probably has a negative impact, but I want some studies (done). We need data, and I want to see that,” said Boyle, who moved to Gill in 1997, when only a handful of oil and gas facilities shared her space.

The Air Quality Control Commission under the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is considering tougher regulations requiring stricter maintenance and reporting procedures on the industry, In home display which already is required to control 95 percent of fugitive emissions from their equipment in the field.

Public comments are being accepted now and, come August, a formal proposal may come about — the fifth time in the last eight years that the state has tightened emissions control standards on the industry. Some believe the industry can capture 98 percent of its emissions.

Weld Air and Water members plan to play a role in the process.

“The requirements that we’ve had have been very successful at minimizing air emissions from the oil and gas industry and other industrial sectors,” Will Allison, director of the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission, said. “But we’re seeing tremendous growth projected for the industry. We want proactive regulations that can enable us to meet that growth.”

That could mean increasing reporting requirements, documenting possible fugitive emissions at every juncture and more regular maintenance with stronger technologies, to name a few — things many in the industry say they already do on their own.

Industry insiders say they, too, are concerned about the environment, and they already go above and beyond current regulations to keep air and water clean.

“We all live here, and breathe the air and drink the water and want to go home safely,” said Korby Bracken, director of environmental health and safety for Anadarko Petroleum Corp., one of Weld’s two biggest operators with roughly 5,300 wells in the field today. “We’re doing our part to help protect things we enjoy every day. What we do in the fields is not because of rules and regulations in place. It’s because it’s the right thing to do.”

 The main concern is about what’s called volatile organic compounds unique to the oil and gas industry that contribute to ozone pollution, a chief component of smog.

“About half of all VOC emissions in the state have origins in the oil and gas sector,” said Dan Grossman, regional director for Environmental Defense Fund’s Rocky Mountain office in Boulder. “It’s our belief that if you look at the relationships between increasing activity, and emissions, it’s consistent. As oil and gas goes up, VOC emissions go up. It’s common sense.”

A recent study by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder showed that in 550 air samples taken at an air monitoring station in Erie, in the southwestern-most part of Weld, oil and gas was responsible for 55 percent of the hydrocarbons that contribute to ozone formation in that area.
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