The Denver City Council this week rejected a $25 million contract to buy asphalt from Suncor Energy because of the pollution generated by the company’s Commerce City refinery.
“If you live in Denver, you know about the history of Suncor and some of the things Suncor has done and the harms it has caused residents of Denver, even though it is in Commerce City,” Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer said during Monday night’s meeting as she called on her colleagues to vote against the contract.
The council voted unanimously to find another vendor for asphalt.
Now, city staff is working to shift the asphalt contract to another company, even though city finance rules require the council to do business with the lowest bidder.
At Monday night’s council meeting, city staffers said the next company in line was Husky Marketing and Supply Company, a subsidiary of Calgary, Canada-based Cenovus Energy. Suncor’s headquarters are also in Calgary, and the two companies have partnered in the past on offshore drilling projects.
City staffers could not answer questions from council members about who supplies Husky with its liquid asphalt or whether it was brought to Colorado via pipeline, train or truck.
Efforts to reach representatives of Suncor and Husky on Tuesday were unsuccessful.
The Denver City Council has a precedent for such moves.
In 2019, the city killed $10 million in contracts with CoreCivic and Geo Group, which were operating community corrections facilities, better known as “halfway houses,” because both companies run detention centers on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“We as a council, certainly the councils I’ve been on the last six years, we have made some pretty clear statements about who we will do business with and who we won’t do business with,” Sawyer said.
During the meeting, Councilwoman Shontel Lewis said she would vote no on the asphalt contract because Suncor is a major contributor to ongoing environmental justice problems in North Denver, where pollution impacts people of color and residents whose incomes typically are lower than the city median at a more intense level than people who live in other neighborhoods.
“I do not believe in partnering with an actor that is responsible for more than most of the injustices in our history and who remains to be a major problem for North Denver,” she said.
Suncor is the primary supplier of liquid asphalt in Colorado, although Denver’s most recent contract, which expired in February, was with another company. The liquid asphalt is manufactured from crude oil at the Commerce City refinery.
Liquid asphalt is mixed with aggregate — crushed stone, sand and gravel — to pave roads. Another company will provide the aggregate.
Suncor had not contracted with the city for asphalt in about 10 years, but was the lowest bidder for the latest contract, which would extend through February 2030.
An executive order in Denver requires the city’s Department of General Services to hire whichever company submits the lowest bid. But the City Council has the power to override that order, which it did Monday night. The council’s finance committee, which is led by Sawyer, voted Tuesday to award the contract to Husky, which was the backup bidder to Suncor.
The decision to choose another asphalt provider will result in minimal delays with the city’s road paving plans for the summer. It will cost about $60,000 more per year to go with the next lowest bidder, said John Essex, the interim director of the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure’s street maintenance program.
That amounts to about $300,000 for the life of the contract.
Suncor, which operates the only refinery in Colorado, refines 98,000 barrels of crude oil per day, and provides about 40% of the gasoline and diesel used to fuel cars and trucks in the state. A refinery has been in operation on the banks of Sand Creek in Commerce City since 1931. Suncor bought two refineries operating next to each other on Brighton Boulevard in the early 2000s and operates them under one umbrella.
Suncor is one of the largest single-source polluters in Colorado, and for decades the refinery has released toxic chemicals into the air and water, sometimes exceeding the amounts allowed under its federal permits.
Those substances include hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen sulfide and benzene — all chemicals that can make people sick with asthma and other respiratory diseases as well as cancer. The plant also emits nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which create ground-level ozone pollution on hot summer days and contribute to the brown haze across Denver’s skies.
It also sometimes spills excessive amounts of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and other toxins into Sand Creek, which flows into the Platte River a few hundred yards from the refinery.
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