Oil and natural gas explorers including Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and Encana Corp. have escaped a vote in Colorado that would've limited drilling and threatened to halt about $10 billion worth of oil and natural gas production a year.
A proposal known as Initiative No. 78, which would've restricted drilling near homes, fell about 21,000 valid signatures short of the total needed to qualify for a ballot vote, based on a projection in a statement from Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams. A measure allowing local governments to ban fracking also failed to attract enough signatures.
The measures had threatened to wipe out oil and gas drilling in Colorado, the sixth-largest gas producer among the 50 states, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis. Initiative No. 78 alone could've barred drilling across 90 percent of the state, where explorers extracted about $10 billion worth of oil and gas last year, the report showed.
Energy explorers would've left Colorado "in droves if voters ever approved ballot initiative 78," Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Rob Barnett, Bernard Chen and Vincent Piazza said in the analysis on Monday. Drillers Anadarko, Encana, Noble Energy Inc., PDC Energy Inc. and Whiting Petroleum Corp. account for about 70 percent of the state's output, they said.
Synergy Resources Corp., a Denver-based company that explores for oil and gas in the western United States, gained 26 cents, or 3.9 percent to close Monday at $6.92, erasing an earlier decline.
Colorado's secretary of state said in his statement that a petition section related to Initiative No. 78 "contains several potentially forged signature lines" and that the department referred the section to the attorney general's office for investigation.
Food and Water Watch and Yes for Health and Safety Over Fracking, groups that helped gather signatures, didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. The initiatives' backers could challenge the exclusion, but "an appeal would appear to be futile," David Tameron, a Denver-based analyst for Wells Fargo said in research published Monday.
"Our fellow Coloradans recognize the strong regulatory structure already in place and the disastrous impacts these measures would've had on our state," Robin Olsen, a spokesman for Anadarko's Rockies division, said Monday by email.
Business on 08/30/2016