Oil’s not sitting well with residents near Thornton
Some homeowners don’t like the idea – or sound – of drilling in the neighborhood.
adams county» A rural quiet breathes over the dirt roads and horse corrals of Wadley Farms in Adams County, a community of 120 homes cocooned in splendid solace amid the thrum of suburban life in nearby Thornton.
But that peace could soon be threatened by the clatter of drilling rigs boring out 20 oil and gas wells in the middle of the neighborhood.
Platteville-based Synergy Resources Corp. has lease rights on deposits of oil and gas in the area. Its drilling and fracking operations could go on around the clock for months, putting a steady stream of fume-belching heavy trucks on the community’s unpaved roads.
It’s a prospect that has some residents desperate to preserve their rural lifestyle. They worry about drinking water contamination — the community relies on well water — and dread that home values will plummet once the rigs move into place.
Mostly, they are alarmed by the size of the proposed operation, which would rank as one of Colorado’s larger neighborhood oil and gas extraction efforts.
“It’s an industrial site in the middle of a residential area,” said Christine Nyholm, who has lived in Wadley Farms for 30 years and raised five children here. “I see it looking like a refinery — I think it’s going to smell like a refinery. It’s supersized.”
Jerry Nelson, whose home on Franklin Street backs up to the field Synergy plans to drill, said the 40 or so tanks and other equipment needed on site to collect and store the oil and gas brought up from deep underground will leave the neighborhood looking more like Commerce City than the quiet, rural enclave it has been for the past 40 years.
“It’s a situation that is going to highly impact everyone in the community,” he said.
Especially the couple’s three severely autistic children, one of whom is sensitive to loud noise, said Nelson’s wife, Rhonda.
“When they don’t sleep, we don’t sleep,” she said.
Neighbors are getting organized, determined to minimize the impacts of the proposed drilling operation — or, better yet, push Synergy out altogether. Last week, more than a dozen of them attended a meeting of the Adams County commissioners to plead for help.
They also are banding together to form an action group called Adams County Communities for Drilling Accountability.
Synergy’s chief operating officer, Craig Rasmuson, said the company is doing everything it can to be open with residents about the project and to be as light on the land as possible. It held a neighborhood meeting in May and plans to sign a memorandum of understanding with the county, which Rasmuson said will hold Synergy to “even more stringent standards” in terms of its operations at the site.
Foremost among the company’s concerns, Rasmuson said, is putting in place a pipeline rather than relying on ground transport to move product. He said such a move would keep trucks off local streets and reduce the number of tanks needed at the site from 40 to as few as six.
“Our hope is to not have an impact there for an extended period of time,” Rasmuson said.
For that reason, he said, Synergy has pushed back its drilling schedule at Wadley Farms to late 2016 or early 2017. Before applying for permits, the company hopes to establish a pipeline right of way in the neighborhood so that truck traffic is limited to the five- to six-month drilling period.
“Once we’ve drilled and once we’ve left, and there’s no truck traffic, I’d like them to sit back and say, ‘It’s not as bad as it seemed,’ ” Rasmuson said.
The situation in Adams County echoes the many battles that have played out in Colorado between neighborhoods and cities that are determined to protect public health and welfare, and oil and gas operators trying to exercise their mineral rights. As the population in the state has risen and the technology for accessing oil and gas has improved, drilling has ended up closer to homes and conflicts have intensified.
Just last spring, residents in Windsor rose up against a proposal by Great Western Oil & Gas Co. to establish a drill site with 28 wells near two subdivisions. And Synergy itself was challenged in the same town on a plan to drill a dozen wells near a neighborhood.
Both companies ended up looking for alternate locations to drill.
While residents of Wadley Farms would love to see a similar outcome, Rasmuson said there is no alternate site. Directional drilling has a limited range and the area around the neighborhood is too heavily developed to find new land, he said.
A spokesman for the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the state agency that regulates the industry, said he couldn’t comment on Synergy’s proposal because the company hasn’t yet submitted an application for permits, but he noted that larger drilling operations closer to homes are increasingly common.
“In recent years, we have seen more applications for multiwell pads in the vicinity of neighborhoods, and we work closely with all parties in each case to work through the inevitable issues involved,” the spokesman, Todd Hartman, said in an e-mail.
Adams County Commissioner Chaz Tedesco said the number of proposed wells at the Wadley Farms site “seems extreme.” But he acknowledged that the county’s hands are tied by numerous court decisions finding oil and gas activity to be under the purview of state — rather than local — government.
“I’m trying to stay within the boundaries of what the county can do without putting the county in a position of being sued,” Tedesco said.
In the meantime, neighbors in Wadley Farms will continue to put up resistance to Synergy’s plans.
“The cards are stacked against us, there’s no question about that,” Jerry Nelson said. “But that’s no reason to give up the fight.”