March 05, 2024 01:22 PM UTC

Colorado's Oil and Gas Industry is Being Killed...AGAIN!

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

How many times can Colorado’s oil and gas industry be totally and completely destroyed? Quite often, it would seem.

Republican State Rep. Gabe-ish Evans, who is also running for Congress in CO-08, is upping the rhetoric dial to 100 on a new oil and gas bill in the Colorado legislature:

Democratic State Rep. Jenny Wilford — one of the sponsors of HB24-1330 — responded quickly via the platform formerly known as Twitter:

We haven’t had a chance to look into the details of HB24-1330, but we were amused to see Rep. Evans insisting that another bill would “outright kill oil & gas in Colorado.” This is a popular complaint for those who worship at the alter of oil and fracking wells, but a history of this extremist rhetoric has always proved to be very silly.

Readers will likely be familiar with the 2019 fight in the legislature over the infamous SB-181, the landmark reform bill that changed the relationship between state oil and gas regulators in the industry from “promotion” of more drilling to the protection of public health and safety first and foremost. Industry shills spent a lot of time, effort, and money screaming to the heavens that SB-181 would destroy oil and gas production in Colorado.

SPOILER ALERT: It did no such thing.

Here’s a quick reminder of some of those claims from 2019:

• SB-181 will destroy the oil and gas industry in Colorado!
  • That…didn’t happen.
• SB-181 was being rushed through the legislature in the middle of the night!
  • Nope and nope.
• Oil and gas companies were already pulling out of Colorado in protest of SB-181!
  • Uh, no.

Six month after the passage of SB-181, Ben Markus of Colorado Public Radio took the time to point out that the oil and gas industry was doing just fine, thank you:

Six months after shouting that new legislative drilling regulations were an existential threat to their industry in Colorado, the state’s oil and gas producers are now whispering a different message to Wall Street:

No big deal.

The law was billed by both supporters and opponents as a sea change in how the industry is policed, giving local governments and state agencies greater authority to decide where and how drilling can occur. But in filings with the federal Security and Exchange Commission, some of Colorado’s largest drillers now express confidence that they can easily navigate the regulations spinning out of Senate Bill 19-181.

“We do not foresee significant changes to our development plans, as we have all necessary approvals of more than 550 permits to drill wells over the next several years,” Noble Energy representatives wrote to investors.

And Noble wasn’t alone in that assessment.

One year later, the price of a barrel of oil did crater…but that had absolutely nothing to do with Colorado.

Evans also claimed in his ‘X’ post above that gasoline prices will skyrocket if HB24-1330 becomes law. That’s a bunch of hooey. As we explained in detail in 2022, gas prices HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH PRODUCTION LEVELS IN COLORADO.

In the last year, O&G producers have consolidated the marketplace in Colorado. As Denver7 reported in August 2023:

Colorado is one of the United States’ top producers of both crude oil and natural gas, ranking fifth and eighth in the nation respectively, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration…

…In the last few years, Colorado’s oil and gas industry has consolidated, largely through mergers and acquisitions. Earlier this month, Chevron finalized its purchase of PDC Energy and became Colorado’s biggest operator. Civitas, another major operator in the state, was formed by combining several of Colorado’s top operators into one.

Many of these companies are now prioritizing freeing up cash, paying down debt and providing share buybacks and dividends.

Perhaps there are better arguments to be made against HB24-1330 than were made five years ago about SB-181. If so, oil and gas industry supporters would be wise to focus more of their attention in that direction.

We’ve heard for many years that various regulations would destroy the oil and gas industry in Colorado; not only does that never happen, but the industry keeps pumping out record profits.

You can only kill an industry once. We’ll let you know if that ever actually happens.