Drilling approved nearer to Rulison blast site

Permits conditionally approved about a mile from center of 1969 nuclear explosion

By Phillip Yates
Post Independent Staff
Glenwood Springs, CO Colorado
April 10, 2008

Print Email

BATTLEMENT MESA, Colorado — The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has conditionally approved 11 permits to drill wells a little more than one mile away from Project Rulison blast site.

Dave Neslin, acting director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), wrote a letter to Gunnison attorney Luke Danielson to notify him of the decision to approve the permits. Danielson is representing area residents who are opposed to drilling within three miles of the blast site.

Danielson had filed an objection over the permits in February. However, the COGCC sent a letter to Danielson, stating the residents did not have standing to request a hearing in connection with the permits.

Instead, Neslin viewed the residents’ objection as a written complaint. He wrote that he could withhold approval of application for permit to drill (APD) if there is “reasonable cause to believe the proposed well is in material violation of the (COGCC’s) rules, regulations, orders or statutes, or otherwise presents an imminent threat to public safety and welfare, in the environment.”

“After carefully considering your objection together with other available information, I conclude that you have not met this burden with respect to these APDs and that I therefore cannot withhold approval of the APDs,” Neslin wrote.

The government detonated a 43-kiloton nuclear weapon 8,426 feet below the surface at the Project Rulison blast site in 1969 in an experiment intended to free up commercially marketable natural gas.

Residents who live near the blast site argue that the use of fracturing technologies, which are designed to stimulate greater production of natural gas from subsurface formations, increases the risk that radioactive contaminants from the Rulison blast site may reach the surface.

The United States Department of Energy prohibits drilling deeper than 6,000 feet in a 40-acre area around the site. The COGCC requires a hearing for any gas wells proposed to be drilled within a half-mile of the site. That is also the position of Garfield County.

Danielson said he and the residents were “extremely disappointed” that the state continues to put the burden on the residents to prove there is a possible danger about drilling near the blast site.

“The state has said repeatedly in the past it is the burden on the applicants (for permits to drill) to prove what they are doing is safe,” Danielson said.

Information request
Neslin’s letter explaining his decision to conditionally approve the permits comes a day after Garfield County commissioners decided to release information the county has about the blast site. The release of the documentation was the result of a public information request Danielson filed.

A part of the documentation is an August 2006 memo written by Tim Pinson, who was Garfield County’s oil and gas liaison at the time. The memo was an assessment of options the county could take about drilling developments in the blast site.

In the memo, Pinson wrote COGCC officials were surprised that Geoffery Thyne, a Colorado School of Mines professor and consultant for the county about the blast site, “advised that 20 percent of the contaminated gas escaped the chamber at the point of the blast, is now unaccounted for and could have migrated past the one-half mile limitation zone.”

Pinson wrote that Thyne’s analysis indicated that the unaccounted contaminated gas could have migrated about 1,500 to 1,750 feet at the time of the blast. The total distance the contaminated gas could have migrated was about 3,320 feet, or 680 feet beyond the one-half mile limitation, wrote Pinson, citing Thyne’s work.

But Brian Macke, former COGCC director, in a June 2006 letter to residents near the blast site, wrote that United States Atomic Energy Commission contractors found that the outer edge of the “modeled zone of enhanced permeability created by the detonation” is located about 2,420 feet inside perimeter of a half-mile of the blast site.

Contact Phillip Yates: 384-9117
pyates@postindependent.com