March 20, 2024
Time to try to stop insanity again. This time we were before the Colorado State Senate Environment and Energy Committee speaking against SB24-165. It’s another selective persecution of the oil and gas industry. This time they’re trying to electrify rigs, prohibit drilling during ozone season (defined as the period from May 1 and ending September 30), and all kinds of reporting nonsense as well. See https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb24-165 for details.
This time Martin used the iPad back camera, so the video is nice and steady, but lost his place in his script a number of times, so had to chop a whole paragraph out on the fly to make the 2 minute time limit. Martin needs to memorize the script enough so that he doesn’t have to keep finding his place in it!
Bill’s rough transcript, he ad-libbed a bit here and there:
My name is Bill Hembree. I’m a 73 year old Air Force veteran and retired software engineer. I’ve lived in Colorado for over two decades and now live near Lyons. My father was a petroleum engineer so I grew up around the oil patch, although my last summer job with an oilfield service contractor was in 1974.
SB24-165 is a pernicious bill in more ways than I can enumerate in two minutes of testimony. So I’ll limit my remarks to a few particularly egregious aspects of it.
The bill’s definition of off-road diesel fueled fleet carefully excludes, agriculture and recreation but includes most obviously oilfield equipment and less obviously heavy construction equipment, such as backhoes, scrapers and road maintainers. Limiting construction equipment to off season use seems like a bad idea to me.
The bill uses the term “renewable diesel” which obviously actually means biodiesel. While biodiesel might reduce CO2 net emissions, it also increases NOx emissions over petroleum diesel. Since the bill’s findings are all about NOx and VOC reductions as ozone precursors and not about greenhouse gases, the renewable diesel requirement is literally counterproductive.
The bill is incredibly overreaching in its definition of indirect sources. These sources include practically all human structures outside of agricultural and recreational use and, oddly, on road parking. A strict reading of the bill would mean that all parking facilities here at the capital and anywhere else in the non-attainment area would have to comply by filing mitigation plans and and paying fees at whatever level the department and commission decide.
This bill is vastly overreaching, poorly written, and leaves far too much discretion to agencies filled with unelected bureaucrats. I urge the committee to reject this bill.
Martin’s rough transcript, left out bits are struck through:
I’m Martin Sandberg, I’m a retired MSEE. I’m a long time Colorado resident and am very concerned about keeping our air clear! After all, we built a house in the foothills that is called “The Views” and its website is the views.org! There you can see some of the amazing Time lapses we’ve captured that make the clouds in the valley below us look like a river.
I think we can all agree on wanting to keep our air clear so our mountain views will remain breathtaking! We all have to live in the real world too, so regulating the oil and gas industry even more strictly will start raising energy prices through the roof and we just can’t afford that.
It was truly amazing to read the whole of section 1, which managed to never mention that the majority of our ozone would be here if the area was completely vacant. Over half of the ozone in the non attainment area would be here even if there was no city of Denver or anything else.
Having looked over all 273 lines of SB24-165 section 2, I see a true maze of regulations for the oil and gas industry to try to find its way through. Line 19 of page 5 however, specifically exempts Agriculture and Recreation. This is simply arbitrary.
Let’s look at places that have put onerous over regulation in place and see what the results were. Look at California, where the average price of gas is about $4.80, $1.20 higher than the rest of the nation. Californians are paying about 30 cents per kilowatt hour, versus the 10 cents that Poudre Valley REA is charging us. Note to Xcel customers, you’re paying about 15 cents per kilowatt hour because of all the wind and solar that Xcel has invested in.
The higher the price of electricity, the more profit they make.
Now for a more extreme case - Germany. They’ve gone farther down the solar and wind road than anyone and are paying, after subtracting out the VAT, somewhere around $6 a gallon and about 40 cents per kilowatt hour.
Will it really be necessary for Colorado to travel any further down this road to figure out that we don’t want to do this to ourselves?
I urge the committee to reject this bill.