Colorado air quality officials have adopted new rules requiring greenhouse gas emissions cuts at “midstream” oil and gas operations that gather and compress natural gas, calling the mandates a national first.
State environmental groups, meanwhile, are glad to see officials target another area of climate change-contributing emissions, but say the cuts should start before 2030 and should not promote a new trading system for credits that may let companies off the hook.
“I wouldn’t call this a win,” said Patricia Garcia-Nelson, who represented Colorado GreenLatinos in hearings and discussions of the new Air Quality Control Commission rules passed in a December vote. Activists did manage to insert tougher language protecting disproportionately impacted communities with the emissions rules, Garcia-Nelson said, but the vote still fell short.
“There are no enforcement parameters in the rule as it’s written right now,” she said.
But Air Pollution Control Division officials say the new limits on midstream natural gas compressor stations and plants further fulfill 2021 legislation seeking greenhouse gas cuts in multiple sectors of the Colorado economy.
The new midstream rules are pioneering nationally because it is a rare instance when oil and gas companies will be required to rip out combustion-fuel equipment entirely and replace it with clean, electrified compression and distribution equipment, rather than tweaking or plugging leaks, officials said. The equipment collects natural gas from different pipelines, compresses it and pumps it forward to downstream users.
“We are going to be requiring them to remove functional existing equipment and install brand new equipment, and that’s a step up in terms of an air quality requirement,” said Stefanie Shoup, manager of the state health department’s Office of Innovations in Planning and Air Quality Assessment. “That’s not typically how the Clean Air Act has been applied.”
The Colorado Oil and Gas Association, in prehearing statements before the December vote, had acknowledged the necessity of the new caps given past legislation, but sought and apparently received provisions delaying enforcement if local electrical grids were not ready to handle the changes.
The target is a 20.5% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the midstream combustion operations by 2030, from a 2015 baseline, or a million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent cut from a base of about 4.9 million metric tons, state officials said. By comparison, Colorado overall is projected to emit about 117 million metric tons of carbon overall in 2025, according to state assessments.
Midstream operations are often remote gathering, compression and forwarding sites for various natural gas wells, from Garfield and Rio Blanco counties on the Western Slope to the oil-rich fields in Weld County on the Front Range. In running large compressors and pumps, often the size of semi-trailer trucks, the midstream operations burn the same natural gas passing through the site. They are often far from an electric grid that would provide cleaner energy.
“The new rule affects 262 existing midstream facilities across 38 companies, and it will also affect any new incoming midstream facilities or companies going forward,” state officials said Thursday.
The rules allow for a credit trading system. A midstream operation might continue to burn natural gas in Rio Blanco County, for example, if they created or bought a credit created by someone else electrifying a midstream operation closer to the Front Range grid, state officials said.
Environmental groups objected to those trading rules, saying communities already disproportionately impacted from historic air pollution would continue to suffer in those more remote areas.
“We feel like we could run into an issue where somebody that’s not necessarily the greatest actor is still going to be able to generate credits and profit from that,” Garcia-Nelson said.
State officials and the air quality commissioners responded to some of those objections by changing the proposed rule language from “should” achieve cuts to “must” achieve cuts in other impacted areas, said Air Pollution Control Division Director Michael Ogletree, in an interview Thursday. Creating credits with greenhouse gas emissions cuts on the Front Range also helps multiple impacted communities by reducing accompanying pollutants like nitrogen oxide that contribute to Colorado’s EPA-sanctioned ozone violations, state officials said.
“The hard part of this rule wasn’t coming up with the concept of how to reduce the emissions,” Shoup said. “The hard part was, how do we get them where we need them? And that’s really what we spent so much time on.”
Midstream operations have already reduced emissions through previous state rules, Shoup said. Setting the next target for 2030 gives companies time to find and install the new equipment that in some cases will take the full five years to acquire, she said.
Ogletree disagreed with environmental groups’ assessments that enforcement of the new rules seems weak. Other legislation in 2024 empowered the health department to increase enforcement and raise penalties for companies failing to meet rules, Ogletree said.
“We’re fully confident that we have the legal authority and ability to go and enforce on any of these companies that are not meeting the requirements as of 2030,” Shoup said.