Oil boom comes to Colorado

NY Times:

The pattern is clear in the oil and gas business: drilling fields are going into new places. North Dakota, better known for growing wheat, is now booming with rigs. Fort Worth has upward of 2,000 gas wells right in the city itself, with most of that growth within just the last five years. Pittsburgh, facing the prospect of urban drilling, forbade it last year by a vote of the City Council.

But few areas are facing the prospect of drilling’s new frontier more vividly than eastern Colorado, where 80 percent of this state’s population of five million people cluster in a line of cities and suburbs stretching out from Denver, Colorado’s capital and largest city.

A 90 million-year-old oil bed called the Niobrara — estimated to contain two billion barrels, locked in shale that in past drilling eras was considered too costly to extract — laces down from southeast Wyoming and Nebraska. And like a cowboy with Saturday-night pay in his pocket, ready to spend big and have a good time, the energy industry is riding into town to drill for it.

Drilling permits in suburbs, parks and even in lakes have made the local news. Using hydrofracturing technologies — breaking the shale with water, sand and chemicals to release the oil — and horizontal, spiderlike tentacle borers that can spin out beneath communities, the still-emerging boom is bringing energy exploration to some of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, and to places with no experience whatsoever in dealing with it.

“It’s completely surrounding the metro area,” said Thom Kerr, the permit and technical services manager at the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which regulates the industry.

The story here is not just about oil, however, but about life in a moment of profound economic and social uncertainty in post-recession America, residents, politicians and industry experts say. Drillers are going into some areas that were once, in rosier times, earmarked for housing or other uses, and elsewhere companies are creating jobs and taxes in communities that have been gasping for air, and ways to make ends meet.

...

Colorado is having to adapt to a fast moving shale oil boom.  The "fire rock" has been known to be there for decades, but until now no one knew how to get it out in commercially reasonable prices.  Some of the new wells are very near people's homes.  That is probably tolerable if you own the minerals, but it feels like a nuisance if someone else owns them.

But people can adapt to the wells.  Kilgore, Texas used to have them on many city lots and behind downtown businesses.