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Residents question well rules
Herald Staff Writer
Photo by STEVE LEWIS/Herald
Janine Fitzgerald speaks out during a public meeting to discuss issues pertaining to produced water from
coal-bed methane wells on Tuesday evening at Bayfield High School.
Click image to enlarge
If you go
A second informational meeting about water and gas wells will be held from 6-8 p.m. today at the La Plata County Fairgrounds.
State water officials were at Bayfield High School on Tuesday evening to provide information about a water case decided last year by the state Supreme Court and related to recently passed legislation.
After nearly three hours of presenting and answering questions, more questions were still rolling in from the approximately 125 people in attendance.
“I know people have a lot of concern," said John Cyran, head of the water-resources unit at the state Attorney General's office.
The most contentious issue at Tuesday's meeting was a map released last month by the state Engineer's Office showing where water is considered tributary - meaning it feeds into streams - and where it is not.
Generally speaking, tributary wells were closer to the Fruitland Outcrop - where the lip of the San Juan Basin curves to the surface in an arch across La Plata County. Meanwhile, deeper wells farther out in the basin toward New Mexico were mostly nontributary.
Janine Fitzgerald, daughter of one of the two Southwest Colorado ranching families that filed the Supreme Court case, said the modeling for the map, which the natural-gas industry hired a consulting firm to generate, was faulty.
“Garbage in gives us garbage out," she said.
She said declaring the water nontributary absolved the industry of having to remedy injury to senior water right holders.
“You don't want to do the work of protecting our water," she told officials.
State Engineer Dick Wolfe defended the map: “I think the process we've been through is a very rigorous process."
State law gives nontributary water to both landowners and gas operators, so long as operators are using it specifically for mining. But only water court can grant either of them an adjudicated right to the water.
The fact that gas companies are speaking up for the nontributary water by filing applications in water court had residents at the meeting asking if they should do the same.
State officials said to have standing in the case, residents, too, must file for a right in court. Once they have a pending application before the court, they can file an objection, which is due by the end of the month.
“You've got to show you've got a dog in this fight," Cyran said.
For decades the poor-quality water produced from area coal beds when operators drill for methane was viewed as merely waste.
But the Supreme Court determined that the water was being put to beneficial use. The result is that all coal-bed methane wells must now have a water permit.
About 2,100 wells in the San Juan Basin will have to be permitted as a result of the ruling. The decision on their water rights applications will be determined separately in water court.
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