At least 404 falsified laboratory reports were made by Eagle Environmental Consulting, Inc. and Tasman, Inc. 55 additional falsified reports were discovered in April 2025, and another 5 were added in July 2025.
On June 3, 2026, the ECMC filed proposed orders assessing a combined $11.6 million in penalties against five operators (listed below) for their roles in the falsified spill remediation laboratory reports we first started covering in December 2024. On the surface, $11.6 million sounds like accountability. Look closer, and the picture is far grimmer.
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.
An aerial image of the Cosslett East facility (separators and other infrastructure), operated by Crestone Peak Resources.
On June 27, 2025, Crestone Peak Resources finally submitted the required chemical disclosures for the hydraulic fracturing jobs at Cosslett East, 5 weeks after PSR/FracTracker’s expose on missing chemical disclosures was published on May 20, 2025. This report was submitted 679 days late; it was originally due on August 18, 2024, 150 days after the last well was spud on March 21, 2023. It’s yet another example where the industry is only held accountable by activist organizations where state regulatory agencies fail to do so.
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.
Actual Water Use is Twice Estimated for Extreme Reach Wellbores
A detail view of the main graph below showing the hydraulic fracturing treatments at the Blue and Sky Ranch pads in Adams and Arapahoe Counties, respectively. The median wellbore length for these data is 5.43 miles, with a median 44.79 MM gallons of water consumed.
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 of47.7 million gallons of water per well and permanently poisoned 304 million gallons of water, more than twice their upper estimate!
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.
There are 79 existing wells within the CAP; 41 plugged and abandoned, 17 producing, 10 drilling, and 11 shut in or temporarily abandoned.
This map depicts the existing oil & gas infrastructure in and around the proposed Lowry Comprehensive Area Plan (CAP) near the Aurora Reservoir in Arapahoe County, Colorado.
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.
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.
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:
A comparison of the directional wellbores for Cosslett (left) and Cosslett East (right).
Once the completion data for the Cosslett East wells becomes available, we’ll update this analysis.
