Brief by Central Staff
Mining – September 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
If you’ve driven from Westcliffe to Walsenburg, you may well have stopped at a roadside information display about the carbon dioxide industry in Huerfano County.
For the past quarter-century, naturally occurring CO2 has been recovered from 4,000-foot-deep wells in the Sheep Mountain area. The gas goes through a pipeline to western Texas, where it is pumped down wells; the resulting pressure pushes petroleum up, where it can be pumped to power our vehicles.
But like all mineral deposits, the CO2 is finite. Production peaked at 287 million cubic feet per day in 1988, but is now down to 37 million. At peak, the CO2 pushed about 57,000 barrels of oil each day toward the wells of the Permian Basin in Texas, and that’s down to 7,400 now. The CO2 fields paid $2.8 million in county property taxes in 1989, and it’s down to $591,000 now.
Huerfano County already endured one major bust when its coal production vanished, and another one is looming as the CO2 dwindles. A Denver Post article recounted the decline of Mandella’s in Gardner. Twenty years ago, the restaurant side was packed for all three meals. But business fell so much that owner Ann Hudson closed the restaurant, and the bar side, which brought in $20,000 a month during development of the CO2 field, brought in just $2,755 in one recent month.
We note, though, that concern about global warming often focuses on CO2, a greenhouse gas produced from combustion when the carbon in organic substances unites with the oxygen in the atmosphere. To reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2, some scientists have proposed putting CO2 underground.
So perhaps there’s a future industry for Huerfano County, since it already has proven, safe subterranean reservoirs for storing CO2. Of course, someone might decide to cut out the middleman, and send the CO2 straight to Texas for injection into oil fields.
