Courtesy of Sandoze
Audio By Carbonatix
An oil refinery in Commerce City did not catch on fire on Monday, May 11, but a power outage did cause dark smoke to flow through the area.
The Suncor Energy refinery returned to normal operations yesterday afternoon, after the power outage prompted a steady flame and black smoke that raised the eyebrows of commuters along Brighton Boulevard.
The facility, which refines nearly 98,000 barrels of petroleum a day, saw similar “increased smoke and flaring” on May 8 after restarting operations following maintenance work that began back in March, according to a press release from the company. On May 11, Suncor released another statement, warning worried neighbors of possible smoke.
The same “flaring” occurred on April 14. During that event, the company said that “flaring is a standard safety practice that allows for the controlled burning of process gases to safely manage pressure.”
Locals flooded social media with various posts discussing the three flares, questioning the black (and sometimes yellow) plumes coming from the location.
“Just started releasing a steady plume of yellow smoke from another stack, but I’m sure it’s fine,” Reddit user Sandoze said on the Denver forum.
“I say shut ’em down,” Debbie Garska wrote on Facebook. “That place is so dirty. Everyone who lives in or near Denver is affected.”
Others questioned if the company had just selected a new pope.
The Commerce City Police Department closed Brighton Boulevard during investigations into the smoke during the May 11 incident, but reopened it within an hour.
Westword reached out to Suncor regarding specifics of the May 11 incident, but has not heard back.
“We continuously monitor the air around our operations and provide air quality data and information with our neighbors and the public through near real-time community and fenceline monitoring systems,” Suncor said in its May 8 release.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment sent an inspector to the refinery Monday afternoon and claimed air pollution was “well below levels where people may experience health impacts,” but said it was continuing to monitor the situation, a spokesperson told Westword. The department believed wind patterns helped move the pollution away from the city.
Suncor’s past history with air pollution violations includes around $10.5 million in penalties issued by the CDPHE in 2024 for unpermitted releases in 2019, 2020 and 2021. In 2023, environmental groups filed a lawsuit that claimed Suncor broke the terms of the company’s Clean Air Act permit with the State of Colorado over 9,000 times in just five years; that lawsuit is still pending.
The Suncor facility started out as two petroleum refineries built in 1931, more than 20 years before Commerce City was incorporated. Suncor Energy USA purchased one from ConocoPhillips in 2003 and the other from Valero Energy in 2005. Now, the combined plant is the only oil refinery in the state.
According to the company, around 33% of the gasoline and diesel fuel used in Colorado each year comes from the refinery.
In an email after the May 11 smokeout, environmental advocacy nonprofit Cultivando called for Suncor and the CDPHE to release information regarding the emissions and provide independent air quality data, pointing to a history of insufficient information surrounding similar events.
“A review of Suncor’s notification history shows this language is an automatic template, reused incident after incident, regardless of severity,” the organization said. “A system that is intended to inform the public has instead been used to reassure them without evidence, and without transparency, that these emissions pose no risk to their health.”
