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February 28, 2023 10:47 AM UTC

Big Oil Reaps Billions In Colorado After Lying To You For Years

  • 15 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Business Journal’s Greg Avery reported last Friday:

Wells of Colorado’s two biggest local oil producers pumped $3 billion in profits last year, and the companies see production holding steady in 2023 despite freezing temperatures sharply cutting production to start the year…

PDC Energy, which has some production in West Texas, expects to average 255,000 to 265,000 barrels of oil and natural gas equivalents per day in 2023. Close to 88% of that will be from northeast Colorado.

Pumping an average of 247,000 barrels of oil and gas in 2022 netted the company nearly $1.8 billion in full-year profits from $4.3 billion in oil and gas sales in 2022, using the sale figure before financial hedges are counted.

Dan Haley of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.

Keep in mind that these huge profits were reaped during the 2022 election year, when the high price of gas and its contribution to general economic inflation was seized upon as a political weapon for Republicans to use against Democrats. As it turns out, “Bidenflation” was a river of profits flowing directly into the pockets of industries who complained the most about the policy changes from ex-President Donald Trump to Joe Biden’s administration.

The massive profits reaped by energy companies while their political surrogates blamed Democrats for high prices charged to consumers is indefensible, but the dishonesty required to make the claim is nothing new–especially in Colorado, where oil and gas producers have been openly lying to the public for years, warning that additional regulations on their business would “shut down oil and gas” production in Colorado. This misinformation reached its peak during the battle over 2019’s Senate Bill 181, which changed the mission of oil and gas regulators in Colorado to prioritize public health over growing the industry. This legislation and its now-proven fictional “disastrous impact” on the oil and gas industry helped fuel a recall campaign against a Greeley-based Democratic lawmaker that forced her resignation in the summer of 2019, as well as the successive failed recall campaigns against Gov. Jared Polis and other Democratic lawmakers that continued to sputter as recently as last year.

Four years after the passage of Senate Bill 181, not only is the industry alive and well, but in their own words thriving like they haven’t in decades:

PDC Energy’s $1.3 billion acquisition of Denver-based Great Western Oil & Gas, which closed in May, gave it more drilling locations, and now the company counts an inventory of 2,100 wells it can drill in coming years, most of which would be profitable at oil prices significantly lower than today, the company says.

“PDC Energy today is in the strongest position in its 50-year history,” said Lance Lauck, executive vice president of corporate development and strategy, during Thursday’s conference call. [Pols emphasis]

Between the passage of Colorado’s landmark oil and gas reforms in 2019 and today, the industry has endured global shocks like the pause in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia–both of which immeasurably more impactful events on the industry than the passage of SB-181. Now that we know this industry reaped massive profits after terrorizing Coloradans over the passage of legislation they warned would “shut down oil and gas” in Colorado, why would anyone trust them when they argue that further regulation to clean up the industry would do the same?

If the price of energy justifies it, Colorado producers will play by the rules to get it. But before they give in, they’ll make up a campaign of lies and foment political chaos to avoid playing by the rules. But the one thing they can’t hide is the massive profits that belie all of their false claims of persecution.

The dishonesty of it all should make even the most battle-hardened coal-roller mad as hell.

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15 thoughts on “Big Oil Reaps Billions In Colorado After Lying To You For Years”

  2. Our eastern plains Nostradamus predicted doom for the oil and gas industry less than two years ago.

    With the pending doom of the oil and gas industry sealed by the passage of SB181, only agriculture is left as an unregulated emitter of methane. The newly introduced wolves won’t do nearly enough to curb bovine emissions; the legislature must act. Until the First Gentleman succeeds in taking us beyond eating meat, methane capture will have to fill the bill. It can be burned instead of coal to generate electricity when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

  3. Just look over there at what Joe Biden and Jared Polis are doing to kill our industry while I stuff my pockets with millions that you paid me at the pump! It's an old game, but a successful one…

    1. There is no more accomplished group of bald-faced liars than the Colorado Petroleum Association. Unless maybe it's the Colorado Oil and Gas Association…or perhaps the American Petroleum Institute. You get my point.

      I spent a number of years squaring off with lawyers, CEOs, engineers, landmen and countless industry-owned politicians. The truth is of no interest to any of them.

       

       

       

  4. “If the price of energy justifies it, Colorado producers will play by the rules to get it. But before they give in, they’ll make up a campaign of lies and foment political chaos to avoid playing by the rules.” 

      I remember the referendum back in the fracking boom, where Colorado would increase it’s severence tax rate to match those bastions of communism, Wyoming, Texas, and Kansas. You would have thought the passing of same amounted to a Venezuela-esk takeover of the industry. After carpet bombing the airwaves with fabricated tails of financial ruin, outspending the pro-bill forces at something akin to 30-1, and threatening to pack up the whole industry and move it to Pennsylvania, the bill was narrowly defeated.

       Perhaps now might be a good time to revisit the issue.

    3. However, and unfortunately, the way this game gets played, especially in Colorado, would have many unintended consequences.

      What should happen is that those higher taxes get held and fund offsets for externalities, clean-up, remediation, and incentivizing cleaner alternatives.

      What happens in those communist states, is that their legislatures and the citizenry come to rely and depend on those O&G revenues for their budget beads and trinkets, and lower taxes on millionaires. The O&G boys wind up buying and controlling the legislatures and those who can afford tax lobbyists. O&G as benevolent overlords.

      What would happen in Colorado, with Tabor, is that those revenues would fund other millionaire tax cuts elsewhere, every household would get their $46 rebate, and there would still be no remediation or alternatives funding (O&G would oppose that).

      It would be great if O&G paid comparable to elsewhere.  But, you’d still have the (Tabor) problem of what gets done with those funds.

      In a properly rigged game, you’re damned when you do, and you’re damned when you do anything else.

      1. Yep. Instead of paying more taxes just buy a few republican legislators. Pennies on the dollar in a system that is inherently corrupt. 

            1. Ten years….where does the time go? Back in my speechifying days I probably quoted Randy more than anybody. He was a fine man.

              Tempus certainly does fugit…

      2. Well Pard, I’ve got to say that’s quite the dark projection you presented.  So because of TABOR nothing good can or will ever happen. Wyoming pays for their entire education system via the severance tax, hardly “beads and trinkets”.

         Now perhaps the Oil and Gas industries in the aforementioned states DOES turn the financial benefits from extraction tax into tax cuts for the “O&G ‘Benevolent Overlords’ “, in those Very Red States. This is Colorado. Methinks that shit wouldn’t fly here. Besides, the Republican handmaidens who do write those afronts into the bills have the power to write in exactly Jack Cheese here, in a 2023 Colorado.

         A properly written bill/referendum ballot question, sent to and passed by public referendum, with specific and hopefully honorable goals should take care of most if not all of the TABOR challenges.  To imply that it could, and probably will go wrong because it tweaks the beak of the powerful is projecting a sense of defeatism that would have awed the French in 1940.  

          The implication that it’s not even worth attempting resets the bar on cynicism, or was that the point?  Not buying it.

        1. That’s cool.  I wouldn’t want anyone to feel the smallest bit of compunction to purchase what isn’t being sold. (The reminder that Tabor is pretty much the root of all evil here in Colorado is freely available to anyone with a pair of eyes.)

          I’m not even disagreeing with your “shoulds.”  I would support them.

          There’s a reason WyoTexaKansans love their O&G, and it’s not a matter of some unique crimson-colored DNA.  It’s because they’ve been bought by, and sold themselves to, O&G. The. Carbon chicken came first. No changing things now, won’t happen.

          Given that Denver proper, by itself, has a 50% larger population than the whole of Antelopia, Carbon’s funding their system may not be exactly chickenfeed, but recognize that Colorado is also at least a one full order of magnitude larger arena.

          We agree on far more than we disagree, mostly that’s likelihood.  A fabulous referendum could be written (a bill wouldn’t be permitted for tax increase issues in Colorado, our legislative majority doesn’t matter); getting that passed, see previous.

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