Home Destroyed In Fatal CO Explosion Was Built 178 Feet From Existing Well

[hatrack]

An explosion at a home in Colorado, which killed two people and prompted the state's biggest oil producer to shut down some of its wells, has highlighted the tension between Colorado's flourishing oil business and its rapid housing development.

It's still unclear exactly what caused the April 17 explosion at a home in Firestone, about 35 miles northeast of Denver. But the home was built in 2015, 178 feet from an existing well that was drilled in 1993, and both politicians and activists say it shows the uneasy balance between the building boom and the energy boom.

Regulators at the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission impose a 500-foot setback between new oil and gas wells and existing homes. But they don't control how closely new homes are built to existing oil wells, Director Matt Lepore said yesterday.

That's left up to local governments, and Firestone requires a 150-foot buffer when a home is built near an existing well, according to the town website. "This subdivision was built after this well was put in — the subdivision moved south slowly toward the well," Lepore said in a news conference broadcast on the web.

EDIT

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060053740

[LunaSea]

1. Built there by the well owner/operator.

As I understand it.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

[pscot]

2. Hoist by his own petard, so to speak

[NNadir]

3. There have been 324 fatalities and 11,492 serious injuries connected with natural gas since 1997...

...according to a (soon to be shit canned, no doubt) database available from the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration.
Pipeline Incidents

Of course, we often hear, decade after decade, how "clean" and "safe" dangerous natural gas is just a "transitional" fuel until the 100% renewable nirvana descends from heaven, as surely it will, even if it is after all the people who have been hyping it's putative inevitability are dead.

It's too bad that the radioactivity releases associated with dangerous natural gas aren't more well publicized beyond the scientific literature.

Maybe people would give a rat's ass about these deaths and injuries.

Of course, if we have "green" hydrogen explosions after all that renewable hydrogen we keep hearing about (but never actually sees) they won't matter either, just like so called "renewable" energy's waste products and limited materials availability.

It's, um, "green," that renewable energy, and the damage it does is irrelevant.