Sorry, your Huerfano County
land will be fracked
They own their land and their mineral rights and the drillers are coming anyway
By SHELBY KINNEY-LANG
Photos and videos by TESSA CHEEK
No further details
Citizens for Huerfano County, a nonprofit community group with around 600 members, has petitioned the Bureau, asking it to review approval of the federal units. The group’s prospects don’t look good. Their first petition— to reconsider the Farisita Unit—has been thrown out; the request to look at the Gardner Unit remains under consideration.
“The BLM, in my opinion, is putting our public land at risk,” said Mary Jensen, a Gardner resident and member of Huerfano group. “We were never consulted. We were never told what the options are. All of this permitting on federal units was done completely behind the scenes.”
Representatives of the Bureau said it doesn’t consider the formation of federal land units “actionable events,” which is why no public input was legally required in Huerfano.
Shell drilled its first well in the area in 2011. There was no federal unit at the time and the community met with Shell reps in public forums that met nearly a dozen times from roughly December 2011 to May 2013. The forum created a dialogue, according to attendees, who said they thought Shell initially did a good job laying out their plans for the area.
GARDNER, Colo. — “I keep a photograph of a drilling site and I look at it every day and I say, 'Not here.'”
Bianca Abeyta untacked the photo above her desk and handed it to me: green countryside ripped apart for an oil well.
She lives with her husband Ben in an adobe home they spent two years piecing together near Gardner, in southern Colorado’s Huerfano County, population 6,500. They moved to the scrubland from Pueblo, where the city air exacerbated Bianca’s asthma. A grandfather clock chimed in the living room across from their fireplace every quarter hour. Bianca gave a tour of the house, and opening the door to her bedroom, filled with porcelain dolls, she said “This is my kingdom.”
In the world outside, beyond the bedroom, the Abeyta’s kingdom is shrinking. In October, the Bureau of Land Management OK’d a Huerfano County 25,000-acre “federal unit” for Shell Western Exploration and Production Inc. The unit includes the Abeyta’s land. They never signed anything. They made no agreement with the feds nor with Shell. They still own their land and their minerals, and yet, they can’t stop the drilling. The feds drew the unit. Shell made a deal with the feds. Now Shell can do what it wants.
Shell has 50,000 acres of federal-unit leases and an additional estimated 150,000 acres of private-land leases in the Huerfano area.
Naturally fracked
Locals worry about how the local geology will support fracking. The area is dotted by volcanic plugs and dikes, where magma flowed up through cracks in the earth millions of years ago. As the magma cooked the rock around it, the rock sometimes cooled quickly and cracked, like hot water poured over cold glass.
“The area is considered naturally fracked,” Briggs said, which he argues makes fracking in the area dangerous.
“There are no definites in geology,” said Ken Watts, a hydrologist at the US Geological Survey office in Pueblo. “When they frack in a horizontal well, they’re trying to generate vertical fractures… Your primary concern is where there is some kind of path for vertical migration to your water supply.”
That’s what happened in the Petroglyph disaster. The Colorado Oil and Gas Commission ordered the company to shut down operations when its methane wells in the area contaminated dozens of domestic water wells. The commission’s Cease and Desist Order said staff believed the “conduits for methane migration [were] most likely the naturally occurring igneous dikes.”
Residents worry fracking in Huerfano will pollute deep aquifers or send gas or industrial fluids into more shallow reserves. Some of the proposed wells are also near drainages, locals point out. Spills are commonplace in Colorado, and locals know it.
“In the long run, in any one of these [proposed] wells, if the casing screws up, I’m worried about all our water,” Mace said. “Bottom line, we are on our way to becoming a pincushion.”
Gasland nightmares
Past mining ventures have generally brought bleak results for Huerfano.
“[The county] has barely been able to give anybody any hope, whether it was gold mines or uranium mines,” said Jeff Briggs, a member of the citizen group. He noted that “huerfano” translates as “orphan.” For Briggs, and other back-to-the-landers, Huerfano’s isolation and lack of mineral resources is a good thing.
“The only thing that’s been [successfully] developed has been CO2,” he said.
In 2009, a company called Petroglyph tried to bring up methane and ended up opening devastating leaks. It was the stuff of Gas Land nightmares. A local water well exploded into 30-foot flames. The leaks ruined water supplies and forced Petroglyph to cease development. Memories of the disaster still haunt locals.
The community talks about earthquakes and ruined air quality. But it is the perceived threat to water supplies that fires palpable anxiety.
“Water is scarce here. It’s precious,” said Keli Kringle, a co-founder of the county citizen group.
“Drought has a huge influence [on the county’s money problems],” said Dale Lyons, who serves on the Planning and Zoning committee for the county. Lyons is also the Local Government Designee, an appointed officer who receives all the oil and gas-related paperwork from the state.
“That’s why counties tend to embrace oil and gas, because they see it as a form of revenue, because of the decreased revenue from all these other sources,” she said.
But many in the community think the likely costs of extraction will outweigh the benefits. Huerfano County’s Water Conservancy Board only secured water rights for the Gardner area in the last couple of years and is clearly concerned.
“What’s at stake is those guys doing an absolutely perfect job in managing their drilling and not screwing up the water. That’s where we’re at,” said Kent Mace, a member of the board. He doesn’t necessarily trust so-called experts to protect the water. “The [drilling company] scientists say one thing and another group would probably say something else.”
“We’re squeaky,” said Roz McCain, a member of the county citizen’s group. “I mean, that’s what it is -- it’s being a squeaky wheel to get inspections. I call and complain about this, that, and the other thing, and there’d be an inspector there the next day.”
Briggs drove me to see the as-yet-undeveloped well sites. The sun was bright in the January sky. He pointed to a spot where drilling was supposed to begin soon. We stood for a minute and listened. Wind rustled through the grasslands, nothing else much, which is just what residents of the valley love to hear.
Squeaky for silence
I ran into the director of the oil and gas commission, Matt Lepore, at a coffee shop in Denver.
He carried two ancient-looking tomes on the law of “pooling and unitization” a day after I made a request to the commission about the Abeytas’ rights.
“I'm trying to figure out exactly what's going on. What are the conditions within a federal unit when the COGCC would force pool unleased mineral rights?” I had asked the commission in an email.
In the coffee shop, Lepore said it wasn’t his area of specialty.
Activists in Huerfano say they want Shell to know they’re watching.
Colorado landowners find themselves powerless on 'federal unit' controlled by Shell Oil
Gardner is located in southern Colorado about an hour south of Pueblo. The possible fracking area around the town is roughly outlined in light grey. The two federal units total 50,000 acres.
A 'paperwork excercise'
This part of the state is high desert, more a part of the Southwest than the Rocky Mountains. Along the sparse roads are homes built in the adobe style, windows facing south. Ranches and grazing land patchwork up to the Sangre de Cristos. Volcanic dikes run down Sheep Mountain like the spines of long-dead dragons.
The area around Gardner housed a number of communes during the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s, and bits of that era’s idealist and sustainable thinking mark the local culture. There is a wide-open stillness that locals fear will be destroyed when Shell starts working the vast tracts it now controls.
“A unit is simply a paperwork exercise that puts a line around a bigger area. It says ‘OK, we’re going to start drilling in here at this location, and if we get a paying well, we’re going to agree to be sharing it in this manner,’” said Jerry Strahan, the Bureau’s branch chief for fluid minerals.
“A federal unit doesn’t change the oversight in any way. You have the state [inspections] on all oil and gas wells, plus our oversight.”
Units bring together many leases to act as one for a single company. The unit is a mega-lease and a combination of private and public lands overseen by the state and federal government. The company begins by drilling a single well, called a “validating well.” Then the company can drill more wells at specific intervals, methodically developing the area in the unit. The rules are designed to prevent frantic development by many producers snatching up adjoining leases. When the Colorado Independent visited the approved drilling sites for the units in January, no work had yet begun.
At least a tenth of the leases in a federal unit must belong to the government. In the Farisita Unit, for instance, 30 percent is federal land, 11 percent state, and 59 percent private.
But the Bureau doesn’t have to require all private leaseholders within the unit to agree to drilling—only 85 percent of the leaseholders. For the Gardner Unit encapsulating the Abeytas property, 86.7 percent of leaseholders signed away their mineral rights.
The Abeytas are snared in a regulatory spider web that is hard to understand even for area regulators. When Shell comes knocking for the minerals under the Abeytas’ land, their rights will be “force pooled” into Shell’s production. The Abeytas have no say in the matter.
Philippe Heer, the project manager who spoke for Shell at those meetings, also worked for the company in Nigeria in the early 90s, when Shell was accused of collaborating in the murder of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Ogoni tribe.
Residents say the forums ended abruptly when the Bureau began signing off on the federal units. Many felt regulators turned their back on the people.
“We consider our leasing and unitization strategy and approach to be commercially sensitive and proprietary, so we can’t provide further detail,” said Shell’s Deb Sawyer in an email. Local activists say Shell researchers holed up at title company Dotter Abstract in Walsenburg for a week in order to find the right leases for the units.
“As announced earlier, Shell is moving forward to market its Huerfano County assets for divestment,” Sawyer said. According to members of the Huerfano County citizens group, Shell can now sell to the highest bidder drilling rights on nearly 200,000 acres, which is nearly a fifth of the county’s total acreage.
Residents aren’t sure what company or companies they’ll be dealing with in the future, adding to uncertainty.
“If they start drilling close by, we won’t be able to sell the place,” Bianca said. She fears extraction work will bring dust and noxious fumes. “If the wind comes in, that’s it,” she said.