March 7, 2024

Testifying before the Colorado House Committee on Energy and Environment. The subject was bill HB24-1330, which is truly terrifying. In typical sneaky fashion, it says it would “reform” oil and gas permitting. In reality, it would bring permitting to a screeching halt by requiring that fully detailed modeling be done before getting any permits. In other words, companies would have to gamble a lot of up front money, not knowing whether they would get permits or not. 

Wow! The capital building is opulent! We’d never been inside before and didn’t have time to do a good shoot before the hearing started, but this is what we walked by on the way to the Old State Library room, where the hearing was held.

Here’s a shot of the Old State Library room from just inside the entrance. Those hexagonal floor tiles are real marble, hence the variation in color.

This is where the members of the committee sit. The little box with the green, yellow, and red lights on top is the timer for how long we’re allowed to speak. When you’re 10 seconds or so from the end of your time the green light goes out and the yellow light goes on. When you’re at the end, the red light starts blinking. We had just 2 minutes today, there were a lot of witnesses.

The meeting started at 1:30 PM, but we didn’t start our testimony until 4:48 PM. Martin wanted to get some record of the proceeding so he hand held the iPhone and used the back camera. Not the greatest video, but its better than nothing.il

And the real surprise. In our remote testimony, we’d seen these panels and thought they were formally arranged ahead of time. They aren’t! This is how witnesses present at the meeting are handled. The chair or her assistant calls in person witnesses up to the front table in groups of four. We didn’t know that we would be participating in one of these question and answer sessions. So, in addition to our 2 minutes of prepared remarks, we had 10 more minutes to answer questions.

Martin’s rough transcript, he ad-libbed a bit here and there:

I’m Martin Sandberg, I’m a retired MSEE. I’d like to take you on a bit of a journey today. Many years ago, I purchased the URL theviews.org and started looking for a place to build a house that needed that name! The search started down south in New Mexico and then up here in Colorado. 

The search finally led us to a place 6500’ up in the front range, just west of the southern tip of Carter Lake. When we brought our architect up, he was speechless for 10 minutes as he just looked at what we had. You can see Long’s Peak and Mt Meeker to the west, Boulder and Lodo to the south, Almost all the way to Kansas to the east and north to Ft. Collins.

Our contractor said he’d never seen a window order like the one the architect called for to capture the views. When I say I appreciate Colorado’s incredibly clear air, you know how serious I am and wouldn’t want to encourage anything that would damage that!

But, we do live in the real world, and in mid January’s cold snap, we were below zero for two straight days with solid clouds we were burning about 10 gallons a day of propane to keep the place warm. Our condensing propane boiler is about 95% efficient, versus 60% for the most efficient power plants, natural gas combined cycle plants. Then add in transformer and transmission line losses and electric heat would require burning about twice as much fuel as our house does.

How does this make any sense? During that cold snap it was very calm and very overcast, so solar and wind weren’t working, so this is a fair comparison.

There’s another problem that I didn’t see mentioned in HB 1330 - by ceasing permitting, all those mineral rights holders have to be compensated for the state taking their property. This compensation would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars and I don’t see any way for Colorado to pay that.

Please don’t vote for HB24-1330. We don’t need to put more burdens on our already over regulated oil and gas industry!

Bill’s rough transcript:

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. The petroleum industry has changed radically in the half century since my last summer job in the oil patch. Coloradans can rightly be proud that oil and gas produced here is already produced in the cleanest way in the US and probably in the world.

Colorado’s oil and gas industry represents 11% of Colorado’s economy so it is one of the most important segments of our economy. 

Over 110,000 Colorado jobs are directly involved in Colorado’s petroleum industry, with far more dependent on the tens of billions of dollars these workers earn.

I have traveled here today because I’m concerned about the impact of HB 1330 not only on the petroleum industry but also on the myriad small businesses which depend on those workers as customers. 

My parents lived in West Texas for many decades and I observed multiple boom and bust cycles in the oil industry. When oil industry revenues decline, government revenues also decline. This can affect schools and other important functions of the government.

I’m sure members of the committee know even better than I how tough budget fights already are. HB 1330 would negatively impact the petroleum industry and the entire economy of Colorado so I urge the committee not to advance this bill.

Should the committee decide to advance this bill, you should include increased funding for the regulatory agencies involved, so that the industry does not die the death of 1000 cuts as permitting backlogs mount. It is a truism that delay is the deadliest form of denial.