The latest salvo in the battle over oil and gas drilling in Colorado was fired Wednesday, with a group of Broomfield mineral owners filing a lawsuit in federal court that challenges a pillar of state mining law.

The suit, filed with the help of anti-fracking group Colorado Rising, claims that the state’s “forced pooling” statute, which allows an oil and gas operator to extract — for a price — minerals belonging to those unwilling to sell their deposits, is unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs claim that forced pooling violates mineral owners’ rights to contract, equal protection and due process and that the owners often find themselves signing leases “under duress.” Anne Lee Foster, a spokeswoman for Colorado Rising, said the practice is “in essence a taking of private property for corporate gain by order of the state.”

Foster said Wednesday’s lawsuit, which names Gov. Jared Polis and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission as defendants, won’t be the last legal challenge her group will file in the coming months, either, as sweeping Democratic victories at the ballot box in November have invigorated groups intent on seeing stronger regulations placed on Colorado’s booming energy sector.

Neither Polis’ office nor state regulators would comment on the suit Wednesday.

“We want to challenge unjust laws that create an imbalanced system that allows the oil and gas industry to run roughshod over these communities and keep citizens from having a say,” said Foster, whose group was behind last year’s Proposition 112.

The measure, which would have increased the buffer between new wells and homes to 2,500 feet in the name of protecting public health, was voted down in November.

“There will be more (lawsuits) for sure,” said Foster, whose group in the first few days of the new year asked Polis to halt new drilling in Colorado while a comprehensive study on the health effects of the industry’s activity is completed.

The plaintiff in Wednesday’s suit, dubbed the Wildgrass Oil and Gas Committee in court documents, asked a judge to stop the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from pooling any additional nonconsenting mineral owners and to halt oil and gas companies from continuing to drill in areas that include nonconsenting mineral owners.

Dan Haley, president and CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, called Colorado Rising’s lawsuit yet another attempt at “shutting down energy production” in the state.

“Pooling has not only stood on sound legal footing for nearly a century, but it is a critical step in energy development that now requires detailed communication among mineral right owners well before permits are ever filed,” Haley said.

The state produced 132 million barrels of oil in 2017 — four times its 2010 volume. There are more than 50,000 producing wells in Colorado, according to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, with nearly half located in Weld County.

Haley pointed to the “collaborative effort” lawmakers and industry representatives took in tweaking Colorado’s pooling statute during last year’s legislative session, which produced a bill that increased the time mineral owners get to consider a leasing offer from 35 days to 60 days. It also gave immunity to any nonconsenting owner forced into a drilling pool from liability for costs arising from spills or injuries at the drilling unit.

Forced pooling has increased in Colorado as oil and gas operations have crept closer to neighborhoods and long-distance horizontal drilling techniques have enabled energy companies to pierce through additional layers of shale that are often tied to multiple mineral owners. In a press release accompanying its lawsuit, Colorado Rising claimed that one oil and gas company listed more than 900 mineral owners on a forced pooling application for a single well pad in Broomfield.

In 2017, the Adams 12 Five Star Schools district reluctantly leased 39 acres of mineral rights it owns under Horizon High School to Great Western Oil and Gas Co., knowing that if it didn’t it would be forced to do so anyway under Colorado’s pooling statute.

Despite claims made in the suit on behalf of mineral owners, Neil Ray, head of the Colorado Alliance of Mineral and Royalty Owners, condemned the filing Wednesday.

“While Colorado Rising claims it is protecting mineral and royalty owners, the truth is that Colorado’s current laws protect mineral owners,” he said. “We believe this lawsuit is meritless, and is yet another attempt by Colorado Rising to hamstring one of the state’s largest industries.”

Don Ostrander, an eminent domain attorney in Colorado, said forced pooling has generally withstood legal challenges that assert it is an illicit property taking because oil and gas extractors are required to compensate for what they pool. And the potential alternative, where one recalcitrant holdout can block access to an entire deposit, is not fair to other mineral owners who do want to lease their minerals.

The state also has an interest in collecting severance tax revenues from energy production.

“There are public policy reasons for requiring forced pooling,” Ostrander said.

Lance Astrella, a Denver attorney who represents mineral owners and municipalities in negotiating leases with oil and gas companies, said he had yet to see a legal challenge to forced pooling based on a constitutional argument. He called Colorado Rising’s suit “quite creative.”

“I think it has some legs,” he said.

But Astrella said changes to state law that would result from a favorable ruling in the case would likely be more cosmetic than substantive.

“It might change the procedure they have to follow when you force-pool, but it’s probably not going to end force-pooling,” he said.