Suncor Energy is planning to spend more than $57 million to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions at its Commerce City oil refinery, but still expects to miss its 2030 deadline to eliminate enough pollution to meet Colorado’s benchmark for industrial polluters.
Not only will the company miss its 2030 greenhouse-gas emissions deadline, which is required by state law, but Suncor says its Commerce City refinery never will meet Colorado’s reduction demands unless the state creates a fund to help companies finance projects that would lower emissions, according to a new report the company filed with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
“Despite this major capital investment, onsite reductions will be insufficient to meet Suncor’s GHG emissions requirements,” the company’s report states.
Suncor’s investment in five projects at its Commerce City refinery and its determination that it cannot meet the state’s demands were revealed in a greenhouse-gas reduction plan posted on the state health department’s website this month.
Suncor and other large industrial polluters are required to submit plans explaining how they will reduce emissions under a state rule that requires Colorado’s 18 largest industrial manufacturers to reduce their overall greenhouse-gas emissions by 20% by 2030. Thus far, eight companies have filed their plans, and Suncor is one of three companies that said it will struggle to meet the state’s reduction requirements.
The other two are Natural Soda and American Gypsum, and both wrote in their reports that while they will upgrade some equipment, it will not be enough to meet the state’s pollution-reduction demands.
American Gypsum, a drywall manufacturer in Eagle County, said it will buy greenhouse-gas credits on Colorado’s exchange market and alter its production to make a drywall that is a different size and thickness to reach its benchmark. The credit exchange allows companies that fail to meet benchmarks to buy credits from others that successfully cut emissions and use those credits to account for their excessive pollution.
Natural Soda, which mines and makes baking soda in Rifle, said it would also rely on the greenhouse-gas credit exchange until other technology was more feasible and cost-effective.
The other companies that have filed greenhouse-gas reduction plans are Cargill Meat Solutions in Fort Morgan; Golden Aluminum, a sheet metal supplier in Fort Lupton; JBS Swift Foods, a meat processor in Greeley; Sterling Ethanol, an ethanol plant in Logan County; and its sister plant, Yuma Ethanol, based in Yuma County.
Those manufacturers said they will replace aging equipment and adopt new technology to reach their goals. For example, the two ethanol plants will use a carbon-capture system in which carbon dioxide is collected and then sent through a pipeline to be stored deep underground.
Cargill’s report said it would recycle biogas created from anaerobic wastewater treatment lagoons to power on-site boilers.
Of those eight companies, Suncor is the most high-profile because it is one of the largest polluters in Colorado and it is close to densely populated neighborhoods in Commerce City and north Denver. The refinery has been under pressure for years to clean up its facility and has been fined for repeated violations of its federal air permits, which regulate how much pollution it is allowed to emit each year.
Suncor denied The Denver Post’s request for an interview about its emissions-reduction plan and sent an emailed statement that repeated what the company wrote in its report.
In its greenhouse-gas reduction plan, Suncor says it will upgrade technology in five areas, including improving two flares — also known as smokestacks — that burn off gases created during the refining process. Suncor is seeking state approval for one flare project that would reroute gas to a more modern stack and decommission an older, 100-foot stack that has been in operation for 75 years, according to its plan.
The other measures the company is proposing include improvements to its fluidized catalytic-cracking units, which help turn crude oil into gasoline, and installing carbon monoxide analyzers to ensure equipment is running efficiently.
Those five projects will cut 31,129 tons of carbon dioxide annually, the report said. But Suncor needs to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 133,266 tons annually to comply with state regulations, its reduction plan states.
In Suncor’s emailed statement and in the written report, the company said it is a pioneer in energy-efficient refining. “As background, the Commerce City refinery has long been an energy-efficiency leader in the refining sector — both among those refineries supplying Colorado and among similarly sized refineries nationwide.”
However, that statement contradicts the findings of a 2023 Environmental Protection Agency report that said the Commerce City refinery records more malfunctions that release toxic chemicals into the air than other similarly sized plants in the United States.
Suncor included an analysis and a letter from HSB Solomon Associates, a consultant it hired to analyze and compare its Commerce City emissions to other refineries, and that letter stated Suncor is the “best of the best” in its carbon emissions when compared against other refineries in the Rocky Mountain region.
“As a result of Suncor’s high level of efficiency in its operations, there is very little low-hanging fruit to further reduce GHGs at the Commerce City refinery,” the report stated.
Because the company said it cannot spend more money to meet the state’s greenhouse-gas limits, Suncor plans to use Colorado’s new greenhouse-gas credit trading system, which was created when the Air Quality Control Commission wrote regulations in 2023 that required the state’s largest industrial polluters to reduce emissions.
That rule was created after the General Assembly passed a 2021 law aimed at improving the quality of life in neighborhoods most impacted by air pollution and reducing Colorado’s impact on climate change.
Colorado held its first greenhouse-gas credit auction this summer with five companies, including Suncor, spending $68,000 on credits. Those companies bought the credits because they are on track to miss the state’s first deadline to reduce emissions by 2030. However, state regulations prevent the disclosure of how many credits each company bought.
The Air Quality Control Commission has also asked the state’s Air Pollution Control Division to propose a state-managed fund that would help companies pay for emissions-reducing projects. That proposal is expected to be introduced to the commission in February when the state health department requests a hearing on it, and environmentalists are expected to oppose it, saying it creates a “pay-to-pollute” scheme that will allow Suncor and other heavy polluters to avoid making actual improvements to their facilities.
Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. Those gases linger and circle the Earth, causing global warming and climate change that brings on more severe weather, such as rainstorms and intense summer heat. They also impact human health, causing respiratory and heart diseases, and some cancers.
The manufacturers that produce these gases typically are located in communities where the people are Black, Latino or Native American and earn less money than the state median income.
Colorado wants to eliminate 100% of its greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
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