Many Boulder residents chafe under the tyranny of Big Oil, which supplies the gasoline, natural gas and asphalt in the Whole Foods parking lot on which their survival depends.
But fortunately, there is a way to rescue the city from the talons of Big Oil. (Just as all babies are beautiful, all dogs are good and all bicyclists are Little Lord Fauntleroys, all oil companies are Big.) Anyway, if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. Boulder should start its own oil company.
You know, like Exxon, Shell, or BP — with its own wells, refineries, pipelines and filling stations — all publicly owned and operated. Just like Boulder’s putative municipal utility.
Call it Peoples Republic Organic Petroleum and Natural Natural Gas.
Hey, how hard could it be?
Just lease a couple of rigs, pick out some drill sites, and have at it. And in just a few short months everyone in town will be singing “My God, How the Money Rolls In.”
How much money? Well, over in Weld County they’re drilling wells that will produce 750,000 barrels each over their lifetimes. Even at today’s depressed oil prices of about $50 a barrel that works out to an ultimate payoff of around $37.5 million a well, most of it coming in the first two or three years.
What’s more, in Weld they’re drilling 24 wells per square mile. This works out to $900 million per square mile (or $1.8 billion per square mile if the price of oil returns to $100 a barrel in a couple of years, as a lot of analysts think it will).
Only taking the 58 square miles in the Boulder Valley into account, Boulder could be sitting on a $50 to $100 billion bonanza. And the city owns thousands of additional acres of open space outside the Boulder Valley.
Boulder could solve all its problems, bang dead, if it just cowgirled-up and got in touch with its inner oilman.
Within a few months, the City Council would have the wealth of Croesus at its disposal. Or at least the wealth of Michael Bloomberg. Just imagine what a bunch of nanny-statist busybodies can do with money like that? There’s virtually nothing they couldn’t improve. Starting with you.
Taxes? Histoire, baby!
Open space? Boulder would have enough dough to buy Louisville, Lafayette, Lyons and Longmont — along with the mineral rights — and relocate them to the Nebraska Panhandle.
Parks? Boulder could have parks that would rival the hanging gardens of Babylon.
Diversity? There would be an influx of people from groups that Boulder has had a hard time attracting despite decades of trying. Roughnecks, for instance.
Affordable housing? Who needs it? A lot of roughnecks make $100K a year. They’d feel right at home in Boulder. Especially after they see all the “new urbanist” housing the council approved east of 30th Street. It looks just like a man camp in North Dakota.
And so on.
But are there really accumulations of oil and natural gas under Boulder, sufficient to turn the city into the Kuwait of the West (or at least the North Slope of the South)?
Well, Boulder has already had one oil boom. It started in 1902, on Feb. 5, 1902 to be exact, when an oilman named Isaah Canfield found oil in a 2,200 foot deep well named the McKenzie No. 1. (You can still see its pump jack and holding tank in the median strip at the Boulder end of the Longmont Diagonal.)
That Boulder boom quickly played out, but the McKenzie No. 1 kept on producing for more than 100 years. When it was finally plugged in 2006 it was still producing half a barrel a day.
The oil in shallow deposits like those tapped in 1902 usually didn’t originate where it was found. It was formed in deeper rock formations, called source rock, and then migrated upward.
Around here, the source rock is the same shale formations that are producing the oil and gas bonanza in Weld County, including the Niobrara Shale, which is about 7,000 feet below the surface. It is not universally drenched with oil, but there are a number of “sweet spots” throughout it. Just guessing, but given the presence of the shallower pools that were found a century ago, Boulder should be a prime candidate for one.
But wouldn’t drilling and (shudder) fracking in the Boulder Valley be terrible for the environment? Au contraire! If the drill sites are selected properly, it could lead to major environmental improvements.
The obvious choice for drilling sites would be a) areas that have already been disturbed, and b) areas that would actually be upgraded, environmentally speaking, instead of made worse by drilling.
Two possibilities immediately present themselves. The first is the Twenty Ninth Street Mall (or Crossroads, as we old-timers still call it).
The site has been serially occupied by three different shopping centers since 1962. That’s seriously disturbed ground.
Boulder’s worst environmental problems — air pollution, congestion, noise — are caused by burning gasoline, not by producing it.
If the site were scraped and turned into a drill pad — it could easily accommodate several dozen wells — tens of thousands of vehicle trips a day would be instantly eliminated.
What’s more, the roughnecks could walk to work, eliminating still more trips.
The other sites that would be ideal choices for well pads would be prairie dog colonies on Boulder open space. When it comes to creating “brown fields” suitable for redevelopment, these little dickens are nature’s grand masters.
The benefits of scraping a prairie dog colony for drilling are self-evident. In exchange for a couple dozen deep holes you get rid of 20,000 to 30,000 shallow ones.
Besides, no one ever got Bubonic Plague from an oil well.
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This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
