Mapping gas flowline and gathering system infrastructure mandatory in Colorado

There are nearly a million natural gas and oil wells in the United States, most of which have used fracking to release natural gas and tight oil from underground geological strata.  To gather and collect gas and oil from these wells a vast infrastructure of flowline and gathering has been placed in the ground.  For the most part this has been unregulated and the location of these pipelines is unknown.  The report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the 2017 explosion that killed two people and destroyed a home in Firestone, Colorado determined the likely cause was a natural gas leak through a pipeline that had been severed during construction of the home two years earlier.  The pipeline was a gathering line from an Anadarko well that had been officially abandoned, but the gas valve at the Anadarko well for the line had never been turned off.

When oil and gas operating companies develop new wells they bury flow and gathering lines to collect products from these wells. The lines consist of miles of unregulated pipe for which the operators themselves may not have exact locations, because the lines are generally considered “temporary use” assets. Once a set of wells was depleted, the gathering lines were abandoned, but remained in the ground.

In April 2019, Senate Bill 181 was passed in the Colorado assembly.  It made the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) responsible for regulating previously unregulated gathering lines.  In response to SB-181 new rules adopted by the COGCC late in 2019 required the oil and gas industry to provide maps of their flowline and gathering system infrastructure.  Much of this infrastructure had never before been documented or identified.

This rule making by COGCC has major implications for oil and gas companies. In 2013, Colorado had 58,200 miles of intrastate gas pipelines of which about 17,300 miles is gas gathering lines.  For comparison Texas, which has the largest pipeline infrastructure in the U.S. with over 450,000 miles of pipeline (about 1/6 of the total pipeline mileage of the entire United States), has over 240,000 miles of gathering lines, most of which is currently unregulated.  In Colorado the COGCC has collected information on about 7,000 miles of flow lines and has published publicly available maps of these flow lines on their website with an accuracy no less than plus or minus 25 feet.