Protecting Erie: By residents, for residents.
Since we’re under the threat of additional drilling at Coyote Trails, here’s a deeper look at the connection between the noise, odor, and other complaints made about the drilling and hydraulic fracturing/completion operations at the 27 wells of the Coyote Trails pad in 2018 and 2019.
tl;dr
Extraction Oil & Gas intends to drill an additional 18 wells at the Coyote Trails pad in unincorporated Weld County, just outside of Erie, Colorado. We are working diligently with other organizations, the Town of Erie, and the City and County of Broomfield to prevent this Application for Permit to Drill (APD) from being approved. Most recently, their APD was denied by the ECMC Commissioners in a 4 to 1 vote during a January 24th, 2024 commission hearing. The operator will most likely resubmit their application with additional information, the timing of which is unknown.
We’ll be updating this FAQ as we get additional information from the various involved parties. Where possible, links to additional/source material have been provided.
Continue reading “Coyote Trails FAQ”As complicated and difficult as it can be to submit a complaint to the ECMC (fka COGCC) about an air quality, noise, or odor issue at an oil and gas facility in Colorado, the number of complaints lodged with any location is a good measure of the negative impact that oil & gas exploration has in our neighborhoods. With data obtained from the ECMC, here’s a data table showing the sites that logged more than 20 complaints of any kind since 2010.
On Wednesday, January 24th, the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) made the unusual move of hearing an application to drill (APD) at the existing Coyote Trails facility in unincorporated Weld County, just northeast of the Vista Ridge development in Erie.
Below is the testimony given by Erie Protector’s Editor in Chief, Christiaan van Woudenberg.
Continue reading “ECMC Coyote Trails Form 2 Testimony”We’ve seen that modern hydraulic fracturing permanently poisons over 10 million gallons of water per well drilled — it’s a staggeringly large number that is hard to grasp. Here are some comparisons to give you a better idea of “how much” is in 10 million gallons of water.
500 standard swimming pools.
A standard swimming pool holds around 20,000 gallons of water.
6,250,000 toilet flushes.
A typical toilet flush uses 1.6 gallons of water.
138 Colorado homes’ use of water for an entire year.
The EPA estimates each American uses 82 gallons of water a day at home, for a total of 29,200 gallons per year. The average Colorado household size is 2.6 people per family.
9.64 square miles of lawn covered with 1″ of water.
You could cover 6,171 acres, or 9.64 square miles of lawn with 1 inch of water.
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This visualization shows the amount of water used to frac each of the wells drilled within the municipal boundaries of Broomfield, Colorado since 2017. The data is grouped by operator, with the most recently fracked wells shown first. In total, 848.76 million gallons of water have been used to frac these wells, with a median of 12.57 million gallons of water used to frac each of the 67 wells.
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This visualization shows the amount of water used to frac each of the wells drilled within the municipal boundaries of Erie, Colorado since 2017. The data is grouped by operator, with the most recently fracked wells shown first. In total, 626.48 million gallons of water have been used to frac these wells, with a median of 9.64 million gallons of water used to frac each of the 57 wells.
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We’ll be updating this FAQ as we get additional information from the various involved parties. Where possible, links to additional/source material have been provided.
From the NRDC:
“Modern high-volume hydraulic fracturing is a technique used to enable the extraction of natural gas or oil from shale and other forms of “tight” rock (in other words, impermeable rock formations that lock in oil and gas and make fossil fuel production difficult). Large quantities of water, chemicals, and sand are blasted into these formations at pressures high enough to crack the rock, allowing the once-trapped gas and oil to flow to the surface.”
For more information, visit:
Hydraulic Fracturing 101 at Earthworks.org
Fracking 101 at the NRDC (the Natural Resources Defense Council)
The proposed Draco pad is located northwest of CR 6 and CR 7 at the Crestone Hub. View on Google Maps.
On March 26, 2025, the ECMC Commissioners voted to approve the Draco OGDP.
In Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V of this series, we showed that each hydraulic fractured well permanently poisons millions of gallons of water.
Once again, the Erie community is under assault with the 26-well proposed Draco pad and an additional 18 wells proposed to be drilled at the Coyote Trails pad. Let’s look at the data for the Cosslett East wells, completed in September 2023.
A total of 178,725,812 gallons of water were used to drill these wells, with a median of 13,261,197 gallons per well. This is 18.4% less than the median water use for the original Cosslett wells, but without completion information for these wells (the data is not yet available at the ECMC), it’s not obvious why. For reference, here is a visual representation of the two sets of directional wellbores:
Once the completion data for the Cosslett East wells becomes available, we’ll update this analysis.
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In Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this series, we showed that each hydraulic fractured well permanently poisons millions of gallons of water.
Now that Occidental is fracking the wells at Mae J and Papa Jo / Shumaker, there’s a renewed interest in the amount of water used by hydraulic fracturing, so let’s take a look at the 12 wells drilled at the Cosslett pad by Crestone Peak Resources.
By using more water than any other pad we’ve examined in this series, it’s once again worth saying out loud:
Crestone Peak Resources has used one hundred seventy-five million, five hundred thirty-four thousand, six hundred and seventy-four gallons of water to frack the twelve wells at Cosslett.
A total of 175,534,674 gallons of water, with a median of 16,252,811 gallons per well. It sounds like we’ll expect Occidental to use a similar quantity of water to drill the 12 wells at Mae J.
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