My research question going into this project was pretty broad: how do oil refineries affect the environment and communities around them in Colorado? After a few weeks of digging, that question has gotten a lot more specific, and a lot more urgent.

Colorado has one oil refinery. It sits in Commerce City, just north of Denver, operated by a Canadian company called Suncor Energy. It processes about 98,000 barrels of oil per day and produces most of the gasoline and jet fuel used in the state. It also sits in one of the most polluted zip codes in the United States, surrounded by a community that is 65% Hispanic or Latino with a per-capita income at the 5th percentile statewide.

That last part is not a coincidence, and it is the thread I keep pulling on.


What I Found This Week

The most striking source I read this week was a 2024 peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association. Researchers placed air monitors just northeast of the Suncor refinery and ran them for a full year. What they found, beyond the benzene and hydrogen sulfide that regulators already track, was radioactivity. Specifically, radon gas levels running 2 to 3 times above background when the wind came from the refinery's direction.

Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States. The EPA estimates it kills around 21,000 Americans per year. And here is the part that stuck with me: U.S. regulatory agencies do not require oil and gas facilities to monitor or report radioactive emissions at all. A known carcinogen, coming from a known industrial source, in a residential neighborhood, with no legal requirement to measure it.

The study was funded through a Suncor settlement, meaning Suncor's own violations indirectly paid for the research that revealed this problem. That detail says a lot about how environmental accountability works, or does not work, in practice.


New Questions I Now Have

If radioactive emissions from refineries are unregulated, who decides when that changes? Is it Congress, the EPA, or state agencies like CDPHE?

Commerce City residents have been reporting respiratory problems, nosebleeds, and other symptoms for years. Why does it take an independent research study funded by a legal settlement to generate this kind of data, rather than routine government monitoring?

And the bigger question I keep coming back to: if this is happening in a low-income, majority-Latino neighborhood next to Denver, is it happening in similar communities near industrial sites elsewhere in Colorado?


Attributions

Cover Photo - Jeffrey Beall, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons


Citations

Helmig, Detlev, Justin Nobel, Dani Caputi, et al. "Elevated Airborne Radioactivity Downwind of a Colorado Oil Refinery." Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association, vol. 74, no. 12, 2024, pp. 920-931.

Perry, Joshua. "Suncor Refinery Starting Back Up. Will Things Change for Neighbors?" The Colorado Sun, 15 Mar. 2023, coloradosun.com/2023/03/15/suncor-refinery-pollution-environmental-racism/.