After the hearing was delayed a week by the Erie Town Council due to an administrative issue with publication of supporting documentation, the Redtail Ranch settlement agreement has been rescheduled for consideration at the Council’s December 16th meeting.
How Did We Get Here?
Drums full of contaminated soil from the north end of the Redtail Ranch property await transport and disposal to a Nebraska incineration facility, December 2017.
The original 2020 Redtail Ranch sketch plan adhered to an older 350 foot setback for oil & gas. In an attempt to appease a health/safety focused Town Council in 2024, Stratus proposed a modified plat that adhered to the Town’s current 500 foot setbacks. That application was rightfully denied for a failure to “promote the public health, safety, and general welfare” given the existing oil & gas wells onsite, as well as environmental concerns about contamination from IBM chemical waste dumped on the site in the late 1960s.
The proposed site is surrounded by the Denver Regional Landfill to the north and the Front Range Landfill to the east. As of June 13, 2024, the site is host to 22 producing wells, 7 shut in wells, and 2 plugged and abandoned wells. All 29 of the active wells on the site will have to be plugged and abandoned in the future.
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.
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.
Recently, we stumbled upon FracFocus, an additional resource linked from the COGCC complaint site. FracFocus allows the public to view “Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Product Component Information Disclosure” documents that include some summary information for each well, as well as a detailed chemical composition of the fluids injected at each well head. We ran the numbers for Waste Connections and Pratt, and came up with a single catastrophic statistic: 160,349,639 gallons of water.
