Colorado to fall short of its 2025 & 2030 goals

Does Colorado need to restrict the production of oil and gas? That’s the argument of 350 Colorado

by Allen Best

New analysis has concluded that Colorado will fall far short of its targets for greenhouse gas reduction in 2025 and 2030 unless it adopts new policies.

Based on existing laws and policies, Colorado will get 89% of the way toward its statewide emissions reduction goal for 2025, surpassing it in 2027, according to the study by the state’s Air Pollution Control Division.

As for the 50% economy-wide reduction goal for 2030, Colorado is on track to achieve 87%, not reaching it until 2037.

Colorado can come closer if it implements the near-term actions identified in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Roadmap 2.0. That would get Colorado to success on the 2025 and 2030 goals, but only a year late in both cases.

See the full report: “2023 Colorado Statewide Inventory of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks.”

Or read the executive summary, or an even-shorter two-page overview.

Boulder’s Leslie Glustrom describes it as a classic case of the glass half full. “We have headed in the right direction but we’re not going fast enough,” she says.

Will Toor, the director of the Colorado Energy Office, emphasized progress in an interview with The Denver Post published on Nov. 8. The optimism is based in part on emissions reductions expected to result from a bill passed earlier this year that seeks to revise land-use patterns.

Big Pivots reached out to several state legislators, but with no response, and also to environmental advocates.

The Environmental Defense Fund: The EDF credits the state with efforts to improve the accounting but reaches the same conclusion it has reached after Colorado issued earlier progress reports: we’re falling short.

“The state is still off track from (achieving) its economy-wide emissions reduction goals for both 2025 and 2030,” said Alex DeGolia, who directs EDF’s climate strategy in Colorado and several other states.

For example, the state has outlined actions in its 2.0 Roadmap that need to be taken. And in the industry and manufacturing sector it calls for nearly 50% reductions in emissions by 2030 as compared to 2015 levels. How exactly will those cuts be made? The Polis administration, said DeGolia, has not identified what those actions should be.

Bottom line, said DeGolia, is that even executing the near-term actions identified in Roadmap 2.0, which was issued in January 2023, likely won’t get Colorado to where it needs to be. “We are quite a bit off track,” he said.

350 Colorado, a group that has been nipping sharply at the heels of oil and gas industry — and the administration of Gov. Jared Polis– found the report misleading.

“Although the report shows oil and gas is the highest contributor in 2020, surpassing the electric power sector, the report still obscures the full contribution of the oil and gas industry,” said Heidi Leathwood, climate policy analyst for the organization.

The state report finds oil and gas responsible for 22.6% of emissions. A more accurate statistic, she says, is 26%.

The oil and gas sector produces about five million metric tons of gases called C02e, for carbon dioxide-equivalent, released into the atmosphere in the extraction of the fuels. That is counted as an industrial emission and lumped into a sector in the report called residential, commercial and industrial.

350 Colorado sees other problems with the updated report:

The projected reductions in oil and gas emissions assume that oil and gas operators will all meet their intensity targets under the 2021 Air Quality Control Commission rules, but the rules don’t have strong enforcement.
Oil and gas emissions have been growing, yet the report predicts an imminent cut. They rose 8% between the 2005 baseline and 2020.

“But they predict a 45% cut from 2005 emissions by 2025,” said Leathwood. “That means they would have to cut about 50% of their 2020 emissions by 2025.”

350 Colorado contends that further actions are needed to suppress oil and gas emissions, in part because of the lack of enforcement around the intensity rules.

Yet another shortcoming of the report, according to 350 Colorado, is that it fails to account for the export of natural gas and oil extracted from Colorado to other states and countries. Citing data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the group reports that Colorado, from 2017 through 2022, produced 3.8 times as much gas and 1.7 times as much crude oil as it consumed.

The Air Pollution Control Division was asked for comment about 350 Colorado’s criticism.

“The latest inventory update shows Colorado has made incredible progress in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions,” the division said in a statement delivered by Zachary Aedo, a communications and marketing specialist.

“This is a remarkable achievement considering the state unveiled its first Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Roadmap in January 2021. The division’s latest projections show the oil and gas sector will exceed its reduction targets.”

The upstream segment has historically been the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector, the division noted. “Those emissions will be reduced significantly through the Greenhouse Gas Intensity Verification Rule, which the Air Quality Control Commission adopted in July 2023. This rule sets declining emissions intensities requirements that take effect starting in 2025.”

In categorizing emissions data by sector, the Air Pollution Control Division says it has relied upon state-defined terms in this and other reports:

1) The Colorado legislature defines the oil and gas sector’s emissions as only those “fugitive emissions” caused by the exploration, production, processing, transmission, and storage operations of oil and gas in the state.

2) The Colorado legislature defines emissions that should belong to the industrial and manufacturing sector. This sector accounts for fuel-use related emissions associated with extracting and processing oil and gas. In the inventory, this sector represents the combination of industrial process emissions from the Industrial Processes and Product Uses (IPPU) sector and industrial fuel emissions in the Residential, Commercial, and Industrial Fuel Use subsector.

3) The division designed the state’s inventory to closely align with the U.S. EPA’s National Inventory and the methodologies established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The 424-page document examines the elephant of Colorado’s greenhouse gas emissions from virtually every angle. It talks about the different kinds of greenhouse gases, their sources from forests to feedlots, from cement kilns to landfills, and, of course, power plants, highways and homes.

Historically, population and economic growth were tied at the hip with increased energy consumption. They have been decoupled in the 21^st century.

Emissions had already begun declining even before state legislators in 2019 adopted ambitious economy emission reduction targets of 26% by 2025 and 50% by 2030, both. They had decreased 11.4% from 2005 to 2020. That put Colorado nearly halfway toward its 2026 goal.

While Colorado’s population grew nearly 25% from 2005 to 2022 and the gross state product grew 40.5%, energy consumption declined 1%. Emissions linked directly to energy declined 14.5% during that same period.

What about between 2020 and 2030? That is still to be determined. The Colorado Energy Office and the think tank RMI collaborated in the updated Greenhouse Gas Reduction Roadmap that was issued in 2022.

Modeling conducted in that exercise used three trajectories:

business as usual, which does not consider impacts from national or state policies or actions.
Roadmap baseline scenario, which considers impacts from policies and actions already underway; and
near-term actions, which incorporates pending and future state actions as outlined in the roadmap.

Energy is responsible for 83.6% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Of that, natural gas and oil systems constitute 22.76%, electric power 21.9%, and a sector called residential, commercial and industrial fuel uses comes in at 19.1%, with transportation close behind at 18.5% and coal mining at 1.2%.

Agriculture constitutes the second largest slice of this pie at 11.4%. The remaining 5% comes from waste and assorted other sectors.

Of the 2020 emissions, 61% were attributed to carbon dioxide, 30% to methane, 7% to nitrous oxide, and 2% to a variety of other gases collectively called the “F gases.”

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