Colorado’s Concrete Problem: When Politics Chokes Oil Production

If you want to understand why energy is getting more expensive—and why industrial growth feels like it’s dragging through wet concrete—look at Colorado.

What was once a solid energy-producing state has quietly become a case study in how bureaucratic interference, masked as public safety, can gut critical industries. Doomberg laid it out clearly in their latest piece, Permission Slips. If you’re not already subscribed to their work, you should be: https://doomberg.substack.com.

Colorado didn’t come up with these policies on its own. It imported them. In 2024, nearly 240,000 people left California. And a large number of them landed in Colorado, bringing their political views with them. The result? A leftward lurch in the state legislature and a full embrace of California-style regulation. The kind that sees hydrocarbons as the enemy—even when they power the economy under their feet.

The Denver-Julesburg Basin is no small player. It’s one of the top five oil-producing regions in the country and accounts for more than 90% of Colorado’s oil output. It’s relatively shallow, cheap to extract, and provides high-paying jobs. Naturally, it became a target. In 2018, voters were asked to approve Prop 112, which would have required 2,500-foot setbacks from buildings for any new drilling. The voters said no. The state did it anyway—just a year later, the legislature passed SB19-181, which shifted the mission of the oil and gas commission away from resource development and toward “health and environmental protection.” The new 2,000-foot setback rule passed in 2020 through bureaucratic rulemaking—ignoring the will of the voters entirely.

By 2023, the commission had been renamed the Energy and Carbon Management Commission, and things only got worse. New rules required oil and gas operators to account for the “cumulative impact” of all development—past, present, and future. Translation? If there’s ever been, or could be, another well nearby, you better have a plan to answer for it. Permitting slowed to a crawl. Add to that the convenient loophole where developers can still build homes right up next to existing infrastructure—and suddenly oil producers are boxed in from both sides.

Here’s the part that should make every contractor, ready-mix supplier, and builder pay attention. When you artificially choke off oil supply from a state like Colorado, you don’t just create problems for oil companies—you create cost increases across the entire economy. That includes diesel, asphalt, delivery logistics, and everything else we depend on to build things. The same lawmakers pushing anti-oil policies are also backing low-carbon concrete mandates. Sooner or later, the “cumulative impact” racket comes for cement too.

The scary part is the narrative. When Colorado’s production inevitably declines—and it will—talking heads will call it “evidence” of peak oil, or claim we’re transitioning smoothly away from hydrocarbons. But the reality is this: we’re not running out of oil. We’re running out of permission to produce it.

It’s all politics. It’s not geology. And if you’re in the concrete or construction business, that matters.

Want to understand how this fits into a bigger trend? Go read our last blog on the EPA’s Endangerment Finding and what it could mean if CO₂ is no longer labeled a pollutant. If that ruling gets flipped, it could wipe out the regulatory foundation for a lot of the climate-based restrictions that are currently choking off both the cement and oil industries.

And seriously—support good reporting. Subscribe to Doomberg here: https://doomberg.substack.com