Cullen Lobe’s environmental consciousness was awakened during the Dakota Access Pipeline standoff in 2016 between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and companies planning to run a gas pipeline underneath the Missouri River, the tribe’s only source of fresh water. During his first night protesting alongside the Sioux that November, he remembers being blasted with water cannons by local police.

After returning to Colorado, Lobe soon encountered what he calls the local version of the DAPL fight at Bella Romero Academy, a predominantly low-income, minority, fourth-through-eighth-grade school in Greeley whose ballfields could soon be less than 1,000 feet from 24 fracking wells. Nearby residents have protested the natural-gas development project for years, and Bella Romero’s school district has unanimously opposed the project. Environmental groups have even sued the company behind it, Extraction Oil and Gas, in an effort to put a stop to its plans.

But in spite of such resistance, Extraction is forging on with the Bella Romero development. Fracking is slated to begin in May 2019.

Earlier this year, a handful of local activists including Lobe entered Extraction’s fracking site to stage a protest that included Lobe locking himself to one of the company’s bulldozers. The protest was streamed to Facebook, putting a national spotlight on local concerns about the risks and potential health impacts of a fracking site so close to a school. But what activists believed to be a simple act of civil disobedience has landed them in court, with Lobe, who’s studying journalism and environmental studies at Colorado State University, facing up to a year in jail.

Cullen Lobe could go to jail for up to a year on charges related to a fracking protest near Bella Romero Academy. Anthony Camera

Lobe sees communities across Colorado fighting fracking developments that are increasingly encroaching on neighborhoods and schools.

“I see this everywhere,” Lobe says. “These corporations, they come into these communities and they destroy these communities. They have all the money and power. Now it’s here at home, and there’s no part of my body that says I can sit back and watch this happen.”

Activists like Lobe, environmental groups and even cities are fighting back, hoping that state regulators and companies will hear their pleas. Voters may even get to decide in November how close fracking wells can be to the public.

The controversy over the Bella Romero project dates back to 2013, when a company called Mineral Resources was granted a permit for a fracking operation near a south Greeley charter school called Frontier Academy. Mineral Resources was acquired by Extraction Oil and Gas in 2014, which abandoned its plans near Frontier Academy after significant pushback from parents.

An alternative to the Frontier Academy site was found, about ten minutes to the east. The new site was right behind Bella Romero Academy, where more than 90 percent of students qualify for free and reduced lunch. Extraction didn’t return requests for comment for this story, but it recently told the New York Times that the Bella Romero location offered an opportunity to pipe out oil and gas, which would reduce truck traffic at the site, and to employ sound-minimizing rigs thanks to the availability of electric utilities on the site.

Despite community concerns over public health and safety issues that could arise from the operation’s proximity to the school and surrounding homes, Weld County commissioners unanimously approved the site in 2016, and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the state’s regulatory agency, granted Extraction’s drilling permits in 2017.

Fracking has allowed oil and gas companies to extract hydrocarbons in what would otherwise be energy dead zones. The process involves injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals deep below the ground to fracture geological formations and release hydrocarbons, which are converted to natural gas and petroleum for our energy-consumption needs.

Fracking hasn’t just helped generate huge profits for energy companies; local governments, like Weld County, have profited greatly from leasing their mineral acres. In 2017 alone, the county earned $21 million from its mineral leases. It has 22,204 active wells, according to the COGCC — more than any other county in the state. Those wells produced more than 119 million barrels of oil and over 678 million MCF, or a thousand cubic feet, of gas last year.

The COGCC mandates that oil and gas facilities, including drilling or storage sites, be at least 350 feet from outdoor activity areas like playgrounds, 500 feet from occupied buildings, and 1,000 feet from high-occupancy buildings such as schools, grocery stores or hospitals. For occupied structures, the state measures setback distances from the center of the well to the building itself, not the property line.

A large-scale fracking is set to begin next year near the school, whose students are predominantly low-income and minority. Anthony Camera

In April 2017, a month after the state sanctioned drilling near Bella Romero, four environmental groups, including Weld Air and Water, the Sierra Club, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Wall of Women collectively sued the COGCC to force the agency to revoke Extraction’s permit to frack near the school.

“Extraction has built its business model on going into areas where other operators won’t go. That’s their niche — their special sauce, so to speak. That’s definitely the case [here],” says Kevin Lynch, an associate professor of law at the University of Denver and the attorney representing the groups trying to revoke Extraction’s permits near Bella Romero. “If [Extraction and the state] rush ahead and develop it right now, the children will bear the brunt of it, and there’s no way to undo that.”