Western Slope oil interests are challenging new Colorado greenhouse gas emission rules in court, piggybacking on an April 8 executive order by President Trump urging his Justice Department to fight state environmental rules that his administration thinks are an overreach.
The lawsuit hoping to block rules cutting Colorado pipeline emissions was filed March 21 by the West Slope Colorado Oil and Gas Association. It was not publicized until April 10, two days after Trump’s sweeping executive order put state officials across the nation on alert that their local climate change laws are now a presidential target.
WSCOGA, an affiliate chapter of the broader Colorado Oil and Gas Association, said the rules passed by the Air Quality Control Commission in December are an “overly ambitious and impractical set of regulatory requirements that have a host of unintended negative economic and environmental consequences.”
The suit was filed in Denver District Court; it is unclear if it will collect more backing from other trade groups. The umbrella Colorado Oil and Gas Association said officials are still studying the Western Slope lawsuit.
“Colorado’s overly prescriptive and inflexible regulations have unfairly targeted the midstream operators in Western Colorado, where economic realities and logistical challenges differ significantly from the Front Range,” Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis said in an April 10 news release. “Our oil and gas industry members and our operators have consistently proven their commitment to environmental stewardship, yet the (Air Quality Control) Commission’s one-size-fits-all approach has failed to recognize the impractical and devastating effects these new regulations will have on our West Slope communities.”
Trump’s executive order prompted immediate pushback from state attorneys general, including Colorado’s Phil Weiser, who told The Sun that the order is “an intimidation campaign.”
“We’ve seen other efforts to intimidate states and other actors. We won’t be intimidated,” he said. “There is no legal basis for this.” Any attempt by the federal government to prevent Colorado from enforcing its laws will be challenged in court, Weiser said.
The executive order seeks to remove all “burdensome and ideologically motivated” policies that “threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.”
Those policies, according to the order, are state and local laws that address climate change directly, or that involve environmental justice, greenhouse gas emissions, as well as state or local carbon funds or carbon taxes.
In Colorado, that includes the state’s methane management rules and the first-in-the-nation “midstream” mandates that WSCOGA is fighting in its lawsuit. Trump has already targeted a waiver that allows Colorado to enforce passenger vehicle emissions and scale up sales of zero- and low-emissions vehicles. The administration is also trying to boost American coal production, while multiple state policies in Colorado and elsewhere are phasing out coal-fired power plants in favor of clean wind and solar generating options.
Trump’s newest order directs the U.S. attorney general to identify those policies and “expeditiously take all appropriate action to stop the enforcement of State laws,” and to provide a report of those actions within 60 days.
His order states that environmental regulations “undermine Federalism by projecting the regulatory preferences of a few States into all States,” and sets the stage to argue that energy companies with interstate operations should not be subjected to state-level laws.
“It’s an unbelievably twisted argument that somehow the federal government telling states what to do is serving the interests of federalism,” Weiser said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
“Our authority as a state is to protect our land, air and water and respond to our changing climate. In Colorado, these issues are front of mind with droughts, with wildfire. Our natural resources are core to who we are,” Weiser said. “The federal government has no right to tell us what to do.”
Gov. Jared Polis said in an emailed statement he finds it “disappointing” that Trump is trying to “prop up more expensive energy sources while penalizing the market-driven technologies that Coloradans and Americans are looking for.”
Why West Slope COGA is fighting now
Colorado environmental groups are on alert to defend a host of recent greenhouse gas control and ozone-combatting rules passed by state agencies, even as they criticize state officials for not going far enough in combatting climate change and local air pollution.
The timing of the Colorado lawsuit and the Trump executive order are not coincidental, said Jeremy Nichols, an advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, which is often a part of coalitions filing legal actions to force even tighter environmental regulation.
The lawsuit “definitely raises concerns that the oil and gas industry now feels more emboldened than ever to attack Colorado’s efforts to protect people, communities, and the climate,” Nichols said. “There’s no legal basis for the federal government to ‘go after states,’ but the narrative will certainly push oil and gas industry zealots to file more baseless lawsuits like this.”
The Colorado lawsuit attacks a set of emissions controls celebrated by state air pollution officials for what they said was a groundbreaking targeting of “midstream” methane releases. Midstream pipelines and systems gather oil and gas from production sites and distribute it to pipelines or refiners. Colorado rules passed in December and taking effect in February aim for a 20.5% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from midstream combustion operations by 2030, from a 2015 baseline.
That would be cutting a million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent 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. State officials said the new rules were innovative under past Clean Air Act practices by requiring oil and gas companies to remove compressors, for example, currently powered by fossil fuels and “install brand new equipment” run on electricity.
Under the rules, companies unable to electrify or otherwise clean up remote midstream operations would need to buy air pollution reduction credits from companies who made changes elsewhere.
The West Slope lawsuit says state air pollution officials failed to meet Clean Air Act mandates to justify the value of the new rules through extensive economic comparisons; applied rules meant for highly polluted areas of Colorado to Western Slope communities that are in attainment of air pollution limits; and ignored potentially devastating economic impacts on schools and local governments from loss of employment and tax revenue.
Echoing Trump’s call for greatly expanded American energy production, WSCOGA executive director Chelsie Miera said, “By ignoring local conditions, these mandates have now threatened jobs, jeopardized essential local tax revenue, and risk pushing our operators and their families out of Colorado. We need to produce more energy in Colorado, not less.”