Protecting Erie: By residents, for residents.
On Tuesday, May 20, 2025, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), PSR Colorado, Colorado Sierra Club, and FracTracker Alliance released a report that highlighted low compliance with a 2022 Colorado law designed to prevent toxic exposure to the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing.
Of the 1,114 wells highlighted in the report, 14 of them are located in Erie at the Cosslett East #22H-H168 pad, where wells were drilled and hydraulically fractured in 2023.
Or, the march to the first billion gallon frac pad in Colorado
To understand the massive quantities of water that may be consumed to hydraulically fracture the 26 extreme reach wellbores at Draco, let’s look at the water used by the 394 hydraulic fracturing treatments logged thus far in 2024 to FracFocus, courtesy of the data wizards at Open FF who have made extensive inroads to sanitize and extend the FracFocus data.
Let’s start with the upper extremes, as shown in the graph above. From the Cumulative Impacts analysis for the Blue Pad in Adams County, Crestone estimated they would consume between 102.9 and 147 million gallons of water to frac the 7 wells at Blue.
Crestone Peak Resources used a median of 47.7 million gallons of water per well and permanently poisoned 304 million gallons of water, more than twice their upper estimate!
Continue reading “Extreme Reach Wellbores Require Extreme Water Use”
This map depicts the total amount of water used to hydraulically fracture the wells at oil & gas locations across Weld County, Colorado. While the American Petroleum Institute (API) says “the average fracking job uses roughly 4 million gallons of water per well,” recent proposed projects such as the Draco Oil & Gas Development Plan (OGDP) in Erie estimate they’ll use over 20 million gallons to frac each of the 26 well bores at the Draco pad.
Continue reading “Weld County Hydraulic Fracturing Water Use Map”If you look through the various views of the ECMC Daily Activity Dashboard, you’ll see a view that shows the number of plugged wells by county and municipality over time, but it’s difficult to understand the trends. Are more wells being plugged and abandoned lately, or less? How can I compare this data year over year? To that end, we’ve prepared this visualization:
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.
See also:
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.
See also: