By Richard Martin, Contributing Editor
 
Like a revenant in some cheesy nuclear-horror flick from the 1960s, Project Rulison keeps reappearing, 40 years after the U.S. government set off a 43-kiloton nuclear blast deep under the Western Colorado desert floor. Last week the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission held two days of hearings  on new applications for permits to drill for natural gas near the blast site, which for decades has been ruled out of bounds by both the state and the U.S. Department of Energy.

As part of Project Plowshare, conceived to find peaceful uses for nuclear explosives, the Atomic Energy Commission set off a hydrogen bomb some 8000 feet below the Rulison site – about 30 miles west of Grand Junction, part of the vast Piceance Basin natural-gas formation. The explosion successfully freed up millions of cubic feet of natural gas, but the gas was deemed too radioactive to sell and was flared off instead.

The DOE, which owns the 40 acres immediately surrounding the site, launched a surface cleanup that was completed in 1998. Further protecting the surrounding geology from drilling, the state of Colorado subsequently labeled another buffer zone, reaching to a half-mile from the blast site, out of bounds to energy production. Beginning in 2004, however, energy companies caught up in the gas boom on the Western Slope began lobbying for drilling rights within that perimeter. The proposed wells have been the subject of dispute ever since.

“I think we should just shut the whole thing down,” Garfield County Commissioner John Martin,, usually a natural gas-industry proponent, told a Glenwood Springs audience earlier this year, arguing that not enough is known about potential radioactive contamination from the blast, and that local owners of mineral rights should be compensated by the federal government.

The DOE, meanwhile, has conducted computer-modeling studies, based on the hundreds of nuclear tests carried out underneath the Nevada desert, that show drilling within the half-mile barrier would be safe. In fact, a draft management plan for Rulison issued by the Department recommends that energy companies be allowed to drill closer in. Complicating matters is the fact that the drillers will be using hydraulic fracturing – the process of forcing liquid under high pressure into the rock to create tiny fractures in the rock, thus allowing gas to be pumped to the surface – near the cavity created by the bomb, which is presumably filled with radioactive rock.

“I don’t like being your guinea pig,” local resident Marion Waaells told U.S. Department of Energy officials.

Trying to protect people like Waaells, and the area’s water supply, Martin and other county commissioners “sent a letter this spring to Colorado’s congressional delegation and the U.S. Department of Energy seeking field tests so companies drilling for natural gas near the site in Rulison don’t end up releasing radioactive contamination,” the Associated Press reported.

The locals want field tests before any closer-in drilling; the DOE thinks its computer models prove that the area is safe. To a degree this is all moot: already, drilling rigs are operating within 3800 feet of the actual blast site. Breaching the half-mile ring would bring them only another couple of thousand feet closer. More importantly, with gas prices at rock bottom and the Western Slope production industry essentially at a standstill, little drilling will occur at Rulison in the near term whether the Conservation Commission issues permits or not.

Eventually, when gas prices rise again, gas rigs will probably move closer to the Rulison site, especially given Gov. Ritter’s vision of natural gas as a “mission-critical fuel” for the New Energy Economy.

 Saying “we need real data,” geologist Geoffrey Thyne, a consultant for the county, suggested that test drilling should occur nearer the site, and radiate outward to find the limits of the radioactivity, rather than start at the perimeter and move inward till contamination is found. That seems like a sensible place to start.

The Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, meanwhile, punted: “I suggest we reconsider this issue at a later point in time,” concluded chairman Harris Sherman, “hopefully sooner rather than later.”