Four women legislators in the north metro area are taking air quality actions the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission (AQCC) and Air Pollution Control Division (APCD) have ducked since the passage of SB19-181 on protecting public health and safety and the environment in the oil and gas industry.

Two male legislators with districts facing hazardous materials transportation problems are addressing oil and gas distribution in heavily used transportation corridors.

The two bills, HB23-1294 on Pollution Protection Measures and SB23-280 on Hazardous Material Mitigation, join with SB23-285 on Energy and Carbon Management to reduce pollution health impacts and risks in the state where energy development, production and refining occur.

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The Pollution Protection Measures legislation stretches beyond oil and gas to other industries that must apply for air pollution permits because, in case you don’t know it, the state issues permits for allowed pollution without requiring technical modeling. The deep-sixing of modeling procedures caused staffers in the APCD to blow the whistle on its management for inadequate pollution analysis.

Reps. Jennifer Bacon and Jenny Willford represent communities in the heart of the pollution world in Colorado. Bacon’s district is in northeast Denver toward the airport and Willford represents areas in Thornton and Northglenn. Both locations get pollution from Suncor Refinery and oil and gas development in the Denver-Julesburg play, depending on wind direction, as well as traffic from the I-25 and I-70 corridors. If HB23-1294 gets to the Senate, Faith Winter and Julie Gonzales will take over. Both senators from north metro voted for SB19-181 and have waited ever since for the full force of that legislation to occur.

It could be the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) and AQCC overplayed their hands when they slow-walked their pollution enforcement effort over the last four years. Now, despite the governor’s recent announcement about nitrogen oxide reductions, these four women have put their stake in the ground to clean up the air especially for their district residents.

Though lobbying on HB23-1294 comes in as expected with the oil and gas industry and its business colleagues against the bill and environmental groups supporting, the list of HB23-1294 lobbyists at 44 registrations falls far short of the barrage against SB19-181 at 547 lobby registrations. The 1294 hearing is scheduled for Thursday upon adjournment.

What’s interesting about SB23-280 is it sets a price on the risk of hazardous material pollution. The bill creates the fuels impact enterprise and sets a new fuels impact reduction fee on fuel manufacturers equal to $0.06125 per gallon of fuels delivered for sale or use in the previous calendar month. The fee will run until the fund collects $15 million or more. The money will go to grants and other supports for communities most affected by the risk of location in hazardous mitigation corridors and key commercial freight corridors. This bill has support from the Colorado Petroleum Marketers Association and Colorado Wyoming Marketers and is opposed by the Colorado Petroleum Association.

So a basic premise of SB23-280 is there is a financial hazard cost in developing and distributing fuels that amounts to $0.06125 per gallon that should be allocated to the hazard generators. That premise leads to an extension of the idea.

Since residents in the districts represented by the four women legislators and others suffer daily demonstrable pollution hazard from Suncor, the refinery that’s about to shut down one of its plants for a $100 million maintenance job after the entire plant was shut down for more than two months this past winter, shouldn’t these residents receive a per-gallon fee from Suncor for enduring their business model? Suncor, with headquarters in Calgary, earned $2.7 billion in the first quarter of 2023.

Let’s estimate 50,000 individuals live in a two-mile radius of the refinery. With 100,000 barrels of product produced daily at 42 gallons-per-barrel, that’s 1,533,000,000 annual production by gallon. Let’s assume a $0.10 per gallon pollution fee to offset the cost to residents enduring leaks, flares and various accidents. That calculation produces $3,066 per person annual pollution risk fee that can offset health hazards to individuals sucking in that measurably bad air. That amounts to $153,300,000 as an annual charge to Suncor out of its roughly $27 billion in gross annual profits in 2021 or .057 of the $27 billion.

Though no fee can offset the actual health impacts imposed by pollution from the refinery, the per-person payment could help defray past, current and future health care expenses and make living near the polluter less stressful for residents. As incentive, the fee can go down to the degree the refinery shows with continuous monitoring that its polluting has declined.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.