Colorado regulators and Suncor Energy reached a historic financial settlement over air pollution Monday, with the Canadian company agreeing to pay $10.5 million after its Commerce City refinery spewed excessive amounts of toxic chemicals into the air over three years.
Suncor will be required to pay $2.5 million in fines and spend another $8 million on mandatory improvements to repair its power supply system, which state regulators believe causes a large number of air-quality violations at the refinery.
Sixty percent of the $2.5 million fine will be spent on environmental justice programs because Suncor’s pollution disproportionately impacts neighborhoods in Commerce City and north Denver where Latinos and Native Americans live.
The enforcement package is the largest settlement with a single facility over air pollution violations in Colorado history, state officials said.
“We want the community to know we hear them,” said Jill Hunsaker Ryan, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “We know they are concerned about the health of their community. And we are using all of our tools to prevent this facility from having future air-quality violations.”
Along with the settlement over air pollution violations, the Department of Public Health and Environment also announced it had reached an agreement with Suncor to end a dispute over an air-monitoring program along the refinery’s borders.
In 2021, the state legislature passed a bill that required Suncor to install monitoring equipment along its fenceline in Commerce City to test the air for hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen cyanide and benzene. But the state health department did not approve Suncor’s plan for how it would test the air and the agency also added more compounds that it wanted monitored. Suncor filed a lawsuit over the state’s plan in 2022 but the new settlement will add some of those requirements back.
Suncor spokesman Leithan Slade said in an emailed statement Monday that the company is committed to improvement and meeting its regulatory requirements.
Mounting concerns about pollution
The settlements come as community frustration over the refinery’s pollution continues to mount.
Most recently, Suncor released excessive amounts of carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and smoke and ash in December and January. Those violations remain under investigation, as does the excessive amount of air and water pollution released after a December 2022 deep freeze caused the refinery’s equipment to fail.
Environmentalists and those who live near the refinery were critical of Monday’s settlement, saying the state’s regulatory system is broken because the lawsuit allowed Suncor to delay its responsibilities toward fenceline monitoring and because the penalties for polluting do not provide relief for people’s health problems caused by the refinery’s toxins.
Monday’s settlement covers the period between July 2019 and June 2021 when the refinery exceeded the amounts of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and hydrogen sulfide it is allowed to release. The refinery also violated standards for opacity and visible emissions involving smoke, ash and soot, according to a news release from the state health department detailing the settlements.
The various violations happened because the refinery failed to meet certain operating parameters and experienced multiple power disruptions. That’s why state officials wanted Suncor to upgrade its power supply systems, said Trisha Oeth, the department’s director of environmental health and protection.
A March 2020 settlement between the state and Suncor required the company to perform a root cause analysis of why malfunctions happen. That report uncovered problems with the refinery’s power supply systems, so state health officials mandated a fix, Oeth said.
“The previous settlement really allowed us to hone in on specific pieces of equipment that are causing problems and we have had success with that approach of making them fix that equipment,” she said. “We’re not seeing the same kinds of problems in the past. This is going to have that same kind of result with power reliability.”
State officials were not able to say what specific power supply problems exist at the Commerce City refinery.
However, environmentalists have been questioning Suncor’s power systems, including in December when the company reported that a power supply issue caused an outage that lasted for days and repeatedly sent harmful pollutants into the air.
Monitoring pollution along Suncor’s fenceline
As for the fenceline monitoring program, the settlement will require Suncor to continuously monitor its entire property for six compounds, said Michael Ogletree, director of the state’s Air Pollution Control Division.
When the company submitted its original plan for air monitoring, Suncor wanted its machines to pivot, measuring air samples for five minutes in one direction before rotating and measuring samples for five minutes in the opposite direction.
But state health officials said that was not enough and they told Suncor to install more equipment so the company could take air samples in all directions.
“Initially what they proposed was a pivot so it sits in a shack and then turns every five minutes,” Ogletree said. “Effectively, you’re only covering 50% of the facility 50% of the time, so you could potentially miss, as the instrumentation is pivoting, a plume that’s coming toward us.”
The new settlement will require Suncor to double the number of monitors the company installs so it can pull samples from all directions at all times.
The state legislation specified that Suncor needed to monitor the air for hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen cyanide and benzene. The health department wanted the refinery to pull samples for more pollutants, and under the settlement agreement, the company will also monitor for toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes, Ogletree said.
The more stringent fenceline monitoring requirements should be in place by the end of the year, he said.
Slade, the Suncor spokesman, said the company installed a fenceline monitoring program while the lawsuit was pending and set up another community air monitoring program in 2021.
Data gathered from those efforts shows that pollution levels have consistently remained below the acute and chronic health-protective guidelines used by state and federal public health agencies, Slade said.
“There’s no trust there”
Despite the settlement’s historic price tag, the environmental community that pushes for more enforcement of Suncor said the agreements don’t do enough.
“The state has to stop being cowards in the regulatory process for Suncor,” said Renée Chacon, executive director and co-founder of Womxn on the Mountain and a Commerce City councilwoman.
Chacon said Suncor should not be in charge of an air monitoring program to measure its own pollution.
“It’s still Suncor adding more monitors for themselves to monitor themselves,” she said. “There’s no trust there.”
Earthjustice, an organization that provides legal assistance to environmentalists, represented multiple local groups as a party to the lawsuit over fenceline monitoring and consistently works as a Suncor watchdog.
Ian Coghill, senior attorney for Earthjustices’ Rocky Mountain Office, said the enforcement action took too long.
“We’re glad to see that Suncor will finally be required to make changes to prevent future violations, but residents should not have to wait over four years for Suncor to be held accountable,” Coghill said. “Suncor’s repeated air pollution violations have harmed the surrounding community for decades. While the fenceline monitoring requirement is finally resolved, Suncor successfully avoided monitoring its entire fenceline for two years by filing this lawsuit.”
Suncor Energy owns Colorado’s only refinery, which processes about 98,000 barrels of crude oil daily. The facility produces gasoline and diesel fuel used in cars and trucks, jet fuel used at Denver International Airport, and asphalt used to pave roads in Colorado, Utah and Nevada. The company also owns 44 retail gas stations in the state.
In 2022, Suncor reported gross profits of $27 billion.
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