La Plata straddles oft-explosive divide

By Burt Hubbard, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 10, 2007 at 7 p.m.

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Photo by Matt McClain © The Rocky

Jim Fitzgerald picks chilis in the garden of their home near Bayfield. Fitzgerald and his wife, Terry, have fought the energy companies in La Plata County for decades.

Photo by Graphic by Michael Hall

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LA PLATA COUNTY — A methane gas explosion rocked a mountain outside Durango in June 1932, spewing rocks and causing landslides.

In the mid-1990s, Amoco bought a half- dozen homes near Bayfield that had been infiltrated by methane gas. Methane gas continues to percolate in several creeks north of town.

In 2005, Charles Yoakum turned on his gas stove and blew up his trailer south of Durango that had filled with methane gas leaking from an abandoned well. He spent six months in the hospital recuperating.

Today, signs along the Animas River across from the new Wal-Mart in Durango warn pedestrians about a noxious gas byproduct of methane.

In La Plata County in southwest Colorado, methane gas is both a source of wealth and an unpredictable environmental threat.

"The horse is out of the barn. There is no way we know of right now to stop it," said Mike Matheson, the consulting geologist for the county. "They (methane gas seeps) will continue for at least 300 years."

Because of its unique geology, La Plata County has a long history of energy exploration. Most of the southern half of the county is astride the San Juan Basin, where coal seams and methane gas deposits are joined.

Wildcatters from New Mexico came in the 1930s, drilling for oil. But exploration really took off in the late 1980s when energy companies — spurred by a federal alternative energy tax credit — found ways to extract methane gas from coal.

Today, the county extracts enough gas daily to heat more than 100,000 homes.

Two-thirds of the county's property tax revenue comes from oil and gas exploration. That means the average homeowner pays about $600 less a year in property taxes than if there were no gas production, according to a county study.

The gas boom also has brought high salaries to the area. A 2005 study by Fort Lewis College in Durango found that the average gas industry salary in the county was $84,000, triple the average yearly pay in La Plata.

But the exploration frenzy has brought with it environmental concerns and conflicts as drilling rigs and well pads have become neighbors to homeowners throughout the southern half of the county.

In some cases, the wells arrived after the homes, with homeowners owning the land but not the mineral rights beneath it.

In other cases, homeowners followed the wells, said Butch Knowlton, director of emergency preparedness for La Plata County. Many used private roads built by energy companies to gain access to remote areas where they built their homes, he said.

The mix of homes and wells has been an uneasy arrangement at times.

Jim and Terry Fitzgerald have fought the energy companies ever since they moved into their self-sufficient home east of Bayfield. In the late 1980s, they were at the forefront of the campaign to stop drilling in the nearby HD Mountains.

"Terry jumped in front of the bulldozer and I jumped on top of it," Jim Fitzgerald said.

The couple, who gained a partial mineral right when they purchased their property, receive some royalties from the wells on their property. But they have required first Amoco and now BP to write out the checks to their company, Hostages of Gas Drilling LLC, or HOG.

The Fitzgeralds, who depend on spring water for their house and garden, and another couple won a lawsuit in water court earlier this year that would force drilling companies to go through the time-consuming process of getting water permits from the state water engineer.

The case is under appeal.

"It's not about us. It's about a lot of people," Jim Fitzgerald said.

On the other side of the county, Barbara Barnes and her husband, Johnny, live in a two-story stone house a hundred yards from a large, humming gas processing plant southeast of Durango. A second plant is right around the corner.

They couldn't be happier.

"People ask me how I can stand the noise," Barbara Barnes said. "But they've just been very good to us."

Her husband's grandfather first opposed the energy companies' bids in the 1950s to buy the adjacent land where he grew wheat, but he eventually made peace, she said. Relations have been good ever since.

Barnes recalls the time when she was home alone with her young children and the cows got loose. The plant workers came to her rescue. "They helped me put them back in," she said.

The royalty checks allowed her to retire at 55, put both children through college and save money for their grandchild's education, she said.

The wells and plants have been good for the economy, too, Barnes said.

"I think they have put a lot of money into this area," she said. "I don't think this area could have afforded the road and school development that they've had."

Joe Chavez, 70, has mixed feelings about the energy boom going on around him.

As he stands outside his home sighting his .22-caliber rifle, a red-and-white drilling tower looms from a neighbor's property.

"It destroys the peace of mind when you see a well that close to your house," Chavez said.

Yet, the gas companies have been good to him, too.

The first wells were drilled on his property in the 1990s. Soon after, diesel fuel appeared in his well water. The company drilled a new water well for him, he said.

"I feel like they have treated me good," Chavez said.

The energy companies have worked to mitigate the impacts of the drilling, said Dan Larson, director of government and public affairs for BP in the Rockies.

The energy giant routinely pays property owners $25,000 for installing a well pad even if they don't own the mineral rights, Larson said.

The company also has cut back on truck traffic by installing electronic monitoring devices on its wells and has entered into agreements with the county to minimize noise and vapor emissions from its well operations in return for the county's promise not to oppose its application for denser drilling in the basin.

Christi Zeller, executive director of the La Plata County Energy Council, said the energy companies have banded together to maintain and improve the private roads used by local residents.

And when companies put in a rig, they often offer to put up nearby residents in a hotel during the drilling, normally a three-week process, Zeller said.

Now, the county, state and energy companies are turning their attention to the methane seeps, which have been a part of life in the area for decades, said Matheson, the La Plata geologist.

He said the county recently interviewed several longtime residents who recalled that as teenagers they lit the gas as it hissed out of the ground and cooked hot dogs over the flames. "They had a good old time," Matheson said.

The seeps are most prevalent near the edges of the San Juan Basin where the coal beds reach the surface. Officials from the county and the Southern Ute Tribe noticed that the seeps increased in intensity, however, after drilling in the basin accelerated in the late 1980s.

Trees died and elevated levels of methane gas surfaced in homes along West Texas Creek and in the nearby Pine River Ranch Estates, Matheson said. "Trees well over 100 years old were all dying at once. So something happened," he said.

Bob Zahradnik, operating director for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe Growth Fund, noticed the same phenomenon on the reservation. The tribe analyzed well data and concluded the increased drilling had intensified the methane seeps.

Zeller of the La Plata County Energy Council said energy companies are helping study and monitor the seeps, but are not convinced the additional drilling is responsible for the increase.

"It's really hard to say the drilling exacerbated anything," she said, adding that the recent drought and underground faults also may be factors.

In the 1990s, Amoco bought more than a half-dozen homes north of Bayfield that contained elevated levels of methane gas and razed them. All that remains today are the foundation pads and the gray remains of dead trees.

Then on the morning of Feb. 12, 2005, Charles Yoakum, a 70-year-old truck driver, turned on the stove in his trailer south of Durango.

The trailer exploded as the stove ignited two weeks worth of methane gas that had seeped in from abandoned wells while Yoakum was away on the road.

"It threw me into the cabinet, gashing my head," he recalled.

His clothes caught fire, burning his hands, arms and legs. He walked to a neighbor's home and knocked on the door for help. A woman answered.

"I must have been an awful sight," he said. "She was horrified."

Yoakum spent the next six months in the burn unit of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver.

He has since sold his trailer site for the mineral rights to recoup about two-thirds of the $100,000 he says he lost in the explosion.

Matheson said the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission concluded that the gas had seeped into the trailer from several abandoned wells drilled in the 1930s by a wildcatter.

The state has just embarked on a $4 million study to try to learn more about the seeps and how to curtail them.

Yoakum wishes them success.

"I hope they find out before someone is killed," he said.

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