After many years of legal fights and delays, more protective rules governing Colorado’s natural gas pipelines are finally on the way. New Colorado laws enacted in 2021 required the state to come up with better oversight of the increasing numbers of pipelines from new drilling operations and for the new homes and businesses expanding into areas where oil and gas fracking companies have built miles and miles of gas lines. An audit performed in 2023 showed widespread violations of state and federal laws, inadequate inspections, and lack of penalties or fines against repeat violators (even when those O&G operators were responsible for explosions that had injured and killed people).
The new rules require companies and utilities to use advanced detection technology to find pipeline leaks, and stipulates a lower amount of methane leaked that would require O&G operators to repair the leaks, and more frequent inspections for various types of pipelines. The new rules also attempt to help reduce methane levels and reach the state’s GHG goals.
While this is a step in the right direction, environmental groups agree that the new rules do not go far enough. An attorney for Larimer County’s stake in the pipeline rulemaking believes that even the new threshold won’t be strict enough to detect smaller leaks that are still dangerous and that the rules are less stringent than the Federal rules proposed (but not enacted in time) by the Biden administration.
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