For an Energy Boomtown in Colorado, Heady Days Bring Growth and Anxiety
RIFLE, COLO.—It's a little after 5 a.m. on a workday. Dozens of men are piling out of cars and trucks, shuffling across the parking lot, and boarding buses heading north to the natural gas fields. They are wearing jackets, jeans, and baseball caps and not saying much of anything. Their heads are lowered and heavy. Behind them, the Rocky Mountains are barely visible.
These men are part of an influx, a nomadic tide of workers—day laborers, engineers, subcontractors, machine operators, maintenance men—streaming into this small town in western Colorado and the surrounding region amid the wild glow of a new energy boom. Many of them have found lodging together, snatching up hotel rooms, cheap apartments, or long-term rentals, or crowding with other families into single-family homes. Others, usually single and Hispanic, are living in company-built "man camps"—huddles of trailers tucked away in the vast expanse of northwestern Colorado's Piceance Basin.
Powered by a new wave of natural gas drilling, Rifle, a once sleepy town of about 10,000 people, is being transformed. More than 2,500 new homes are planned or under construction. Unemployment is virtually nonexistent. The air is filled with a dusty excitement, but also a familiar dose of anxiety.
Black Sunday. After all, Rifle has been here before. It isn't just some modern-day boomtown riding the country's latest push for domestic energy. Rather, it's a boom-bust-boomtown, or a boom-bust-boom-bust-boomtown, depending on how far back one goes. Most recently, in the late 1970s, Rifle was at the center of a highflying oil shale boom in which energy companies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the region, racing to find ways to liberate oil from underground shale. But when gasoline prices fell sharply in the early 1980s, so, too, did investment in "nontraditional" oil.
Exxon, the largest company in the area at the time, closed up shop on "Black Sunday," May 2, 1982. In a single day, 2,200 workers lost their jobs. Local bars thrived for about a week. Then, a 20-year recession set in.
Today, another boom is taking hold, this time involving natural gas. It's being spurred by rising energy prices and more sophisticated technology that enables companies to drill horizontally as well as vertically. New permits for wells jumped nearly 70 percent from 2005 to 2007 and are projected to rise an additional 20 percent this year. Along the interstate at night, tall, white drilling rigs glow brightly, lighting up nearby mountains. By day, the roads are full of pickup trucks shuttling around heavy equipment and tankers from industry giants like Halliburton. On top of all this action, there is a renewed push by some companies to revive the long-dormant oil shale sector.
During its previous energy booms, Rifle stubbornly maintained the quaint hallmarks of a small town founded in 1882—a main street, corner saloon, store names displayed in western block-style fonts—at the expense of modern conveniences. "If I wanted to buy a shower curtain, I had to drive 63 miles to Grand Junction or 26 miles to Glenwood Springs," says Police Chief Daryl Meisner, who has lived in Rifle for 56 years. But a wave of slick-looking retail franchises recently opened up, among them a Wal-Mart, a Starbucks, and a Taco Bell-Long John Silver's. Just down the street from the Rusty Cannon Motel, a new Hampton Inn is being built, and four more hotels are sprouting up.
The city's mayor, Keith Lambert, estimates that the local population could swell as high as 30,000 by 2025. The city has spent nearly $40 million on new infrastructure proj-ects; another $35 million to $40 million of projects are planned. Housing vacancy rates in Rifle are less than 1 percent, Lambert says.
But the growth is creating complications and arousing feelings of ambivalence among longtime residents. Crime rates, though still low, are up. The town's 22-person police force responds to about 1,400 calls per month—double the number of just a few years ago. Reports of domestic violence and alcoholism are more common. Several new schools are being built to alleviate overcrowding. In many classrooms, the majority of students are Spanish speakers, the sons and daughters of migrant workers coming from states like Texas and Oklahoma. And even amid a national housing crisis, house values are appreciating at a rate of about 25 percent. Simple townhomes now cost close to $300,000.
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Reader Comments
drilling on public land
One of many things to consider, in addition to the impact on wildlife, water & air quality, the beauty of our dwindling natural scene, our continuing need for energy: anyone living adjacent to national forests or BLM land that drilling companies have leased, should brace themselves for what's coming under "drill baby drill" policies. Check the laws--what share of taxes resulting from drillers' profits will your impacted local infrastructure reap--providing oil/gas is found? By the time federal,state, and county take their cut, what will be left to repair the roads that go past your property once those big trucks finish rumbling to the drilling sites that were chosen, not deep in the woods and far away from human habitat, but as close as possible to the very culverts, bridges, and roads that lead to the wilderness that borders your property? What will become of all those beautiful, unobstructed views you thought were protected when you bought your property? While you're checking into the local legalities, it might be a good thing to see if you own your own mineral rights. If not, you may find a drilling rig right on your own north forty...and not have much of a say about it, the oil/gas that's extracted right under your nose, or the money someone else is making from below the surface of the ground you live on!
Writing from a small Colorado town not far from national forest land currently leased for wildcat (exploratory) gas drilling/fracking projected to begin this spring...
Judith Harrington
article
well boys and girls this article is about 2 years to late they , the gas industry , are pulling about 40 % of the rigs out so says the rocky mt news ... gas prices are low now about 6.25 per unit, wholesale . talk of layin down the rigs . my understanding is that means close the valve on existing well s til the price gos up... there are more places to rent and there is some ...not to much unemploymnet .. this article must have been written 6 months ago and just got published.
Those Against It?
Those against the Domestic Energy Industry Boom are either too rich to care and want to pretend that every Rancher, Hunter and Outdoorsman, who have been here taking care of the environment for much longer than they have, don't give a darn about the environment! Only those idealist (usually City Slickers) who believe the "all the little forest animals, dance around together and sing love songs between them (in English no less)" just like in the Bambi Movie, OR those who are politically motivated to disenguously take advantage of joining those who fight against the Hated America, i.e. to blame all evil in the World on the present Administration, in order to gain control again for their own selfish reasons) are against developing our Domestic Energy Industry. A "Scorched Earth Policy" similar to Juvenile Delinquents who's motto is, "If you can't steal, wreck it".
If we don't intelligently develop our own Domestic Energy Sources to get off of sending Billions of American Dollars and Jobs overseas, then all the US Citizen-American Haters will soon find out that life under a Chinese Dictatorship might become inevitable and not be all that good afterall. "You never really know what you've got, until it is gone"!
Oh, I left out one sincere group: "Those who want to believe, at all costs, that the old way is the only good way".
They need to use the same entreprenuerial spirit that put them in their past positions as the "financial overlords" in these small communities to begin with and quit fighting Progress. Learn to live with it and embrace it for the benefit of future generations.
And last but not least, until one truly investigates the overwhelming concensus of the "World-Wide Scientific Community" who have labeled the theory of "Human Caused Global Warming" as "the biggest hoax every perpetrated on Mankind", can one start thinking intelligently, rather than letting their "Autonomic Nervous System (Unreasoned Emotion) Fight/Flight Syndrome" guide their decisions.
The "Scorched Earth Strategies" used by the opposing Party have worked and now they have all the power. But it will be a "Cold Day in Hell" before I will support the same thuggish mentality against our duly elected American President "Barack Obama" despite of what his Party did to our last duly elected American President.
Its time for cooler and more thoughtful Heads to prevail or we will only prolong our difficulties.
Steve Bigelow
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