This story by Jennifer Oldham appeared on Capital & Main on February 4, 2025.. We are sharing it in two parts.
Colorado’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission required Extraction to conduct a “full alternative location analysis” of a site known as Redtail Ranch, a highly contaminated area that was once envisioned as a master-planned community.
Residents’ reactions to the commission’s ruling were mixed. There was little celebration, as the decision would merely move the effects of the industrial operation to the doorstep of other neighborhoods. And the well bores would still be drilled under communities that already have scores of existing wells — including some that need to be plugged and abandoned.
“We will prepare to vigorously oppose [the alternative site] should they make an actual effort to pursue that,” said Christiaan van Woudenberg, a resident who can see the Redtail Ranch site from his back deck. “Until then we are in the shock phase wondering, ‘Do we have to do this again, to fight for our health and safety and the ability to spend time outdoors?’”
When the existing wells were drilled and fracked — a process in which sand and water are injected down a well to release oil and gas trapped in shale miles beneath the surface — on the ranch in 2017, the noise from diesel generators kept van Woudenberg awake for months. The disruption dysregulated his nervous system and forced his neighbors to put 2-inch plastic foam pads in their windows, he said.
Extraction said in its drilling application to regulators that the Redtail Ranch location was among several alternatives for the pad that were deemed unfeasible “due to local regulations.”
The company said it chose the 20-acre site in Weld County in part because electricity is available to power drilling and fracking equipment, allowing it to forgo diesel generators. Commissioners applauded the plan, citing the fact it would cut down on toxic emissions and noise.
Even so, the five-member body expressed concerns about the pad’s location on the outskirts of a planned 3,100-home community, with homes priced between $500,000 and $1.5 million.
The drilling site would be within 2,000 feet of at least 70 residences, a park, walking trails and a school. To reach minerals under the town of Erie, Extraction asked to drill some of the longest horizontal bores ever proposed in Colorado that would run contiguous to existing wells. Residents and town officials expressed fear about the potential for interaction between older wells and the newer bores.
Most complaints in the state
The Draco pad is proving to be a test case for what happens when local oil and gas rules are misaligned. Extraction proposed drilling in Weld County, which requires only a 500-foot setback — less than a length of two football fields — between wells and homes. The town of Erie meanwhile mandates 2,000 feet between the two. The issue is further complicated because Erie is bifurcated by Weld and Boulder counties. The latter enacted a moratorium on drilling in the 2010s. Yet the wells would extend underground from the Draco pad into Boulder County.
But the county, like the town of Erie, has no jurisdiction over the application because the pad on which the wells would be drilled is located next door in Weld, the state’s largest oil and gas county. The jurisdictional confusion triggered by the geographic location of the Draco pad was evident throughout the two-day online hearing on Extraction’s proposal.
“From a land-use perspective, this is a good location,” Jason Maxey, then-director of Weld County’s energy department, said during the November hearing. He said the county determined the application complied with its code requirements and approved it in February 2024. Four alternate locations were considered, he said, and the proposed site chosen was the one that best mitigated effects on residents.
Extraction echoed Maxey’s comments that none of the alternative parcels were viable. This is particularly true of the Redtail Ranch alternative, company representatives said, even though it’s farther from homes and industrial activities that already exist on the site.
“We thought it would be highly unlikely the town of Erie would approve an oil and gas location zoned heavy industrial 2,005 feet away from a residential development to the south,” Jeff Annable, Extraction’s manager of well and location permitting, said at the November hearing
Indeed, the Redtail Ranch location is beset by challenges. Existing oil and gas operations there racked up the highest number of complaints in the state, most from nearby communities. The acreage would need to be rezoned from agricultural/residential to industrial. And questions remain about the presence of water and whether toxic contaminants already on the site were adequately cleaned up.
David Frank, Erie’s environmental services department director, told Capital & Main he met with Extraction in early January to discuss the process for submitting an application to drill on the Redtail Ranch site. The firm would also need to meet with the planning department to begin the rezoning process, Frank said.
It is unclear if rezoning must be completed before the company could request that the Erie Town Council approve an oil and gas permit for the site, he said. Additional analysis is also necessary to determine if the location is more protective of residents, he said.
“The purpose of the alternative location analysis is not to find the most convenient, or easily permitted location,” Frank said. “The fact that the mineral estate they are pursuing is largely in Boulder County, and portions of it under the town of Erie, perhaps those are the local governments that should be granted siting authority.”
The face of activism in Erie
The Erie Town Council rejected an application from Stratus Companies to build homes on the Redtail Ranch site in June, citing existing industrial activities that include a landfill shuttered in 2020, a 1960s-era waste disposal site so toxic that it required a cleanup overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an operating landfill and two active oil and gas pads. One council member called the property “spectacularly contaminated.”
Oil and gas operations on the site over the last seven years also drew hundreds of complaints from nearby communities. Van Woudenberg, the Erie resident who lives across the street from the site, created a website to educate people how to file reports about health effects, noise, light and traffic they observed at fossil fuel sites. He then mobilized residents by putting door hangers on homes.
The action resulted in about 905 noise, odor, light and air quality complaints to be filed against Crestone Peak Resources LLC, which operates two pads on the Redtail Ranch site, documents show. The company is a subsidiary of Civitas Resources Inc., as is Extraction Oil & Gas Inc., the firm that submitted the Draco pad proposal.
Residents of 26 neighborhoods that would be affected by Extraction’s proposal to drill under their homes held a community picnic a few days after the commission’s Nov. 15 decision and recommitted to opposing the project, no matter its location.
“There’s a growing engagement, an excitement, passion and breadth of experiences and backgrounds behind this movement,” Erie resident Sami Carroll, who created the Flatiron Meadows Oil & Gas Monitoring Group in early 2024 to oppose the Draco pad, told Capital & Main.
“I had a woman tell me we’ve changed the face of activism in Erie — this has become bigger and more impactful in so many ways,” Carroll added.