David Zalubowski/AP Photo
A pump jack sits at an oil well along Interstate 25 near Dacono, Colorado, December 22, 2018.
This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. It is co-published here with permission.
Oil and gas companies claim their production in Colorado is among the cleanest and least polluting hydrocarbons in the country—if not the world. Are they right?
The assertion—from a fact sheet by the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, an industry trade group—has legs. PDC Energy, an oil and gas firm recently purchased by Chevron Corp., cited it in an application to drill hundreds of wells, which was approved by regulators in late 2022. U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and his Republican rival Joe O’Dea repeated it in televised debates during their 2022 campaign. And the U.S. Bureau of Land Management referenced it in a 2023 federal supplemental environmental impact statement. Fossil fuel advocates leaned into it in the spring to justify why Colorado legislators should kill a bill that would have phased out fossil fuel drilling.
“We like to say these are among the cleanest energy molecules in the world,” said Dan Haley, chief executive of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, at a March hearing of the state Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee.
“We are the only sector that’s meeting our greenhouse gas goals right now. In fact, we are exceeding our greenhouse gas goals,” Haley said, adding, “We are making up for other lagging sectors.”
Haley’s argument in part persuaded the committee to vote 5-2 to reject a measure that would have prohibited state regulators from issuing drilling permits starting in 2030. The vote came after Republican state Sen. Paul Lundeen set up Haley’s response, saying: “I think Colorado does oil and gas better than any other state in the nation—I believe we produce in a cleaner, better way, a better molecule.”
A Capital & Main investigation found that Colorado’s fossil fuel industry has made strides to reduce emissions that trap heat and warm the planet. Yet it will fall short of future greenhouse gas reduction goals without additional efforts to curb pollution, according to interviews and public records.
To back up its “clean molecule” campaign, the industry touted progress on reducing toxic compounds that contribute to ozone pollution—a claim that’s difficult to verify, given widespread disagreement on the best metrics to quantify such emissions. The nine-county Denver metropolitan area has repeatedly failed to meet federal air quality standards for ozone pollution, which scientists have said causes health issues.
The state’s oil and gas trade group relies on its “Colorado molecule” messaging in part to help deflect attempts by legislators, conservationists and residents to rein in drilling. Energy Citizens, an initiative of the American Petroleum Institute, launched a $1 million TV ad on April 10 that claimed emissions reduction bills in the legislature posed a choice between “foreign energy, or cleaner, Colorado-made oil and natural gas.”
While the oil and gas industry has reduced pollution from its operations, it hasn’t made a dent in the greenhouse gases produced when its products are burned.
Energy companies argue that producing oil and gas in Colorado under a series of first-in-the-nation rules designed to reduce environmental effects ensures that the United States doesn’t need to buy fossil fuels from countries with poor environmental practices. The assertion raises questions about which communities must bear the brunt of pollution created by drilling and its extensive use of limited natural resources such as water, environmental justice advocates agree.
“At the time of the hearing [on the permit ban bill] there were already 70 spills at oil and gas sites” in Colorado, said Ean Thomas Tafoya, Colorado state director for GreenLatinos, in an interview.
“The ‘cleanest molecule’ doesn’t mean we aren’t contributing to the ozone problem and there aren’t spills impacting water and that there aren’t industrial activities impacting communities,” Tafoya said.
Operators are drilling closer to dense suburban neighborhoods, including counties that account for most of the state’s Latino population, according to the Colorado Latino Climate Justice Policy Handbook produced by Conservation Colorado, an environmental nonprofit. Some 58% of the state’s oil and gas wells are in counties with high concentrations of Latinos, the handbook said.
The industry’s successful use of its “clean molecule” campaign to combat threats to its longevity comes as scientists warn that the world must stop burning fossil fuels to limit greenhouse gas emissions that cause more extreme floods, heat waves and drought.
Governments plan to produce about 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 than is consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, as specified in the Paris Agreement, according to a November report by the United Nations Environment Programme and others.
In Colorado, regulators have greenlit plans for hundreds of wells since legislators enacted a law in 2019 to change the mission of the state’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission from promoting production to protecting public health and the environment. The state was the nation’s fourth-largest oil producer in 2022 and its eighth-biggest gas supplier.
The energy industry’s “clean molecule” messaging in Colorado is part of a decades-long national campaign by the fossil fuel industry to persuade consumers it is doing its part to fight global warming and to divert attention from the need to transition away from oil and gas, scientists say.
“Clearly, they are feeling some pressure to be seen as more green. It’s a kind of ‘greenwashing,’” said Kathy Mulvey, climate accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “What we need is a transformation to a clean energy system—it’s not enough to make fossil fuel production marginally less polluting.”
The misinformation campaign became so pervasive that Congress subjected it to a two-year bipartisan investigation that resulted in subpoenas to companies for information and a report that documented the industry’s reliance on “trade associations to spread confusing and misleading narratives and to lobby against climate action.”
The Colorado Oil & Gas Association’s “clean molecule” narrative, spelled out on its web site, said that more than 300 of its member companies use “state-of-the-art technology and innovation to decrease emissions, reduce leaks, limit venting and flaring and disturb less land.”
A Capital & Main investigation found that several of the claims are true but that there is scant publicly available data to verify others. Colorado is a national leader when it comes to reducing its overall greenhouse gas emissions, as well as methane emissions from oil and gas operations, according to data from state and federal agencies.
The Colorado Oil & Gas Association did not return Capital & Main requests for additional statistics to back up its messaging campaign.
The fossil fuel industry is “exceeding its GHG [greenhouse gas] reduction targets compared to other sectors,” according to the 2024 Colorado Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Roadmap 2.0. State rules require producers to reduce such emissions by at least 36% by 2025 and 60% by 2030.
Even so, the Energy and Carbon Management Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, said in a February report: “Additional future actions will be needed to achieve the 2050 net zero goal.” While the industry has reduced pollution from its operations, it hasn’t made a dent in the greenhouse gases produced when its products are burned, which are responsible for more than 70% of energy companies’ carbon footprint, according to the World Economic Forum.
Fossil fuel firms in the state also reduced methane leak rates at their facilities to 13% in 2018 from 28% in 2013 after the state enacted precedent-setting rules requiring the industry to fix leaks and cease venting and flaring natural gas, according to a pilot project conducted by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Nationwide data showed that producers in Colorado vented or flared the second-lowest amount of natural gas—of which methane is the main component—of any state in 2022.
“Through overflights we definitely see better performance in the Denver Julesburg basin than in the neighboring Permian” basin, said Mark Brownstein, senior vice president, energy transition, at the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit that worked with others to develop technology to better measure methane emitted by fossil fuel operations.
“The idea that gas exports from the U.S. are the cleanest, or that gas exports from the U.S. are a net positive for the environment or the climate, simply hasn’t been demonstrated.”
Methane traps more heat in the atmosphere and dissipates more quickly than carbon dioxide, leading scientists to develop powerful new devices, such as a series of new satellites, to better detect greenhouse gases as a way to rein them in.
MethaneSAT, a new satellite sponsored in part by the Environmental Defense Fund, will verify methane emissions figures collected by energy companies and the state, Brownstein said. Such figures often understate the actual amount of emissions, he said.
“The idea that gas exports from the U.S. are the cleanest, or that gas exports from the U.S. are a net positive for the environment or the climate, simply hasn’t been demonstrated,” Brownstein said.
Another metric the Colorado oil and gas trade group cited to back up its “cleanest molecule” argument is the decrease in the number of acres disturbed during construction and reclamation. The amount fell to about 400 acres per oil and gas location in 2024 from about 8,000 in 2011, according to the Energy and Carbon Management Commission. But the acreage cited, which was taken from forms filed with the agency by energy firms, might not all be developed, the commission said in an email.
It’s difficult to independently verify whether the industry is using state-of-the-art technology to decrease emissions. State regulators do not require electric drill rigs or track when operators deploy them, although it encourages their use, the agency told Capital & Main.
“Some operators are able to do this, but it frequently depends on the availability of highline power, which is not widely available in rural or less-populated areas where drilling is occurring,” the commission said.
Also opaque is the industry’s claim that Colorado oil and gas companies operate with lower so-called “emissions intensity”—a measure of how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are emitted per unit of production—than companies in other oil and gas regions.
The state’s Air Quality Control Commission has not historically calculated that figure, said Zachary Aedo, a spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, in an email. But the commission recently adopted rules to require operators to meet greenhouse gas intensity requirements and account for carbon emissions, including methane. Separate directives require companies to reduce toxic compounds that contribute to ozone pollution over the next six years.
In the meantime, conservationists say encouraging competition between energy firms to see who can produce hydrocarbons with less environmental pollution is worthwhile in the run-up to tougher federal and state emissions restrictions that are set to take effect in the next few years.
“I’m more than happy to have the workers of Colorado compete against the workers in Pennsylvania and Texas and New Mexico to see who can produce a product with the least amount of methane emissions possible,” Brownstein said. “That’s a competition worth having.”
