The Future of Oil and Gas Conservation: the past Is Prologue

Colorado and Pennsylvania, like parallel universes, provide strikingly different examples of how external forces affect the evolution of oil and gas conservation jurisprudence originating from a common starting point. This jurisprudence includes both “Classical” oil and gas conservation—measures to prevent waste of the oil and gas resource, and “Values” oil and gas conservation—measures that address the effects of oil and gas development on other resources. By comparing the two states along the continuum of 150 years of production, regulation, related legislation, and case law addressing oil and gas conservation, this paper emphasizes specific points along this time line to highlight important political and historical forces at work in the two states. What emerges today are two states with a number of superficially similar regulatory structures in place, but at polar opposites in the development of a political and jurisprudential response to vastly different industries, economies and populations. The differences between the two states are likely to result in vastly different outcomes for oil and gas conservation for each state and for the future jurisprudence of broadly defined oil and gas conservation regulatory structures that may evolve in other states.