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Letters: Virtually no well room

What Mr. Hunter misses in his “The bigger gas extraction picture” letter is that a 2,500-foot buffer doesn’t function solely as a straight line, but rather a radius. This means that for every occupied building like a home or school, a designated “vulnerable area” (whatever that means, a playground or a drinking water source), you can draw a circle with a 2,500-foot radius around it where no oil and gas can go. Given the sheer volume of places that entails combined with areas that are already off-limits (such as national parks and forests) and accounting for existing wells, when you look at the map with all those circles, there’s virtually no room for any new wells. I suspect this is the point of the ballot measure — a de facto ban on oil and gas — but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking this allows for any development whatsoever due to the length of a drilling lateral.

Carrie Couey

Silt




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