Gov. John Hickenlooper is defending fracking once again, but this time he's ready to go to court.
In a recent interview with CBS4, Hickenlooper told Shaun Boyd in no uncertain terms that the state will sue any city that bans hydraulic fracturing within their borders.
"Nothing makes me less happy then to have to be in a lawsuit with a municipality," Hickenlooper told Boyd. "The bottom line is, the way we have a split estate in this part of the world -- pretty much all of the western United States -- someone paid money to buy mineral rights under that land. You can't harvest the mineral rights without doing hydraulic fracturing, which I think we've demonstrated again and again can be done safely."
When the controversial natural gas drilling technique also known as "fracking" was banned in Longmont in 2012, the state sued the town claiming that the city's oil and gas regulations illegally overstepped the state's authority to regulate the industry.
And just this month, the city of Fort Collins gave initial approval to a ban of most oil and natural gas exploration including hydraulic fracturing within the city limits and Hickenlooper says that the state is prepared to sue Fort Collins. A day after the city announced the initial approval, the oil industry also suggested that it may take legal action against the city if the ban goes into effect, The Coloradoan reported last week.
"We ardently hope that this ordinance will be defeated on second reading so there will not have to be discussions of going to court to allow an activity that the State Supreme Court has clearly stated cannot be banned within a city, county or municipality," Colorado Oil and Gas Association CEO Tisha Schuller said in a statement.
Hickenlooper's charge comes less than three weeks after greenish-brown fracking fluids leaked from a well in Windsor, just east of Fort Collins, for 30 hours before finally being capped off. And just today The Coloradoan reported that the leak is being called a "blowout" and was directly related to fracking.
Hickenlooper has made no secret of his support for hydraulic fracturing, but earlier this month he took one big step further and testified that he actually drank fracking fluid.
"You can drink it. We did drink it around the table, almost ritual-like, in a funny way," Hickenlooper said before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
From The Washington Times:
Sen. Al Franken, Minnesota Democrat, found humor in the governor's admission and asked if the experience was part of some bizarre occult practice.
"No, there were no religious overtures," Mr. Hickenlooper responded.
The governor testified that it wasn't "tasty" but added, "I'm still alive."
Hyrdaulic fracturing is a controversial process of injecting water, sand, and chemicals underground at very high pressures to release natural gas. Most companies however have declined to reveal what components make up their fracking fluids, calling them "trade secrets."
Hickenlooper is not the first person to have claimed to drink fracking fluid. A report by the Associated Press in 2011 said that Halliburton Co. CEO Dave Lesar offered up a company executive to demonstrate the safety of theirnew fracking fluid recipe CleanStim, by drinking it during a keynote speech at a conference held by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.
That being said, Halliburton says on its own website that "CleanStim fluid system should not be considered edible." A report by The Denver Business Journal last year also pointed out that it's not even known whether CleanStim is being used in Colorado since that decision has been left up to the oil and gas companies.
Invited to speak at the committee by Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, Hickenlooper was arguing that states should be taking the lead in natural gas regulation rather than the federal government.
Last year when Hickenlooper was invited to give the keynote address at The Atlantic's Next Generation Energy Forum, he vigorously defended the practice and even went so far as to say that the anxiety about fracking "isn't directly connected to the facts."
"There's a lot of anxiety out there, certainly with hydraulic fracturing and the kind of unorthodox technologies for the extraction of natural gas, but oftentimes that anxiety isn't directly connected to facts," Hickenlooper said during the forum.
Fort Collins City Council passed the fracking ban 5-2 during the measure's first reading, but will take a final vote on the ban in early March.
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