Colorado voters will decide in November whether businesses and homeowners have a constitutional right to heat and power their buildings with natural gas — a question likely to spawn a wide range of other fights over oil and gas in the coming years.
Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced Thursday that backers of Initiative 177, sponsored by fiscal-conservative group Advance Colorado, collected enough signatures in all 35 Colorado Senate districts to make the November ballot. Because it is a constitutional amendment, it must get 55% approval for enactment.
On its face, the two-sentence measure is a simple one. It declares, if passed, that consumers have the right to purchase natural gas for cooking and heating in homes or businesses throughout the state. And it further says that distributors and utilities have the right to sell natural gas for homes or businesses.
The measure comes as the Colorado Public Utilities Commission passed a Clean Heat Plan last year that would require a significant cut in gas-heated residences in order to reach emissions-reduction goals over the next 20 years. And it comes after another state board last year also approved energy-efficient building codes for new homes that favor electric heating over gas-powered appliances.
“We were happy to have our signatures officially certified to put the right to natural gas in the constitution,” Advance Colorado Institute President Michael Fields said in an email on Thursday. “This shows that we have support in every area of the state. We look forward to ensuring Coloradans have access to affordable and reliable energy!”
End of the “grand bargain”?
Advance Colorado Institute President Micheal Fields participates in an online debate on property-tax issues in 2024.
But the reverberations of the initiative are likely to be far more complex.
In April 2024, Gov. Jared Polis announced a “grand bargain” with environmental groups and oil-and-gas firms, agreeing to scrap most of four bills that sought to impose strict regulations on the industry in exchange for creation of a new fee on drilling to help fund transit projects. The deal also nixed proposed ballot measures that that had both sides gearing up for a costly fight on the November 2024 ballot, and it extended the prohibition on ballot initiatives impacting the sector through 2027.
In December 2025, Advance Colorado submitted Initiative 177, arguing that the continued use of natural gas for home heating, even while some groups call for a phaseout of the energy source, is vital to both energy reliability and affordability. Fields has said that natural gas saves Colorado families more than $1,100 a year as compared to other sources of energy if it were not used.
Conservation Colorado responded by submitting four ballot measures in April, proposing to impose strict and also joint-and-several liability for pollution on oil-and-gas companies, hold operators accountable for the full cost of repairing a damaged aquifer and barring utilities from charging customers for extending or decommissioning natural-gas pipelines. While backers said the proposals offered needed protections, industry-backed groups like Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development accused the organization of “trying to raise money on the backs of Colorado’s energy workers.”
How the gas question could spark a bigger fight
GreenLatinos and other groups handed out these signs before a February 2024 news conference at the Capitol demanding new emissions-cutting regulations.
Several weeks later, Polis, and signatories to the grand bargain, including Conservation Colorado, announced they were committed to the détente and said that “now is not the time to play politics with energy in Colorado.” Conservation Colorado did not proceed with getting signatures for its measures.
But Advance Colorado did, and it will continue to push for passage of the constitutional amendment, Fields said. That will set up a showdown not only at the November ballot but, in all likelihood, in the 2027 legislative session and at future elections.
Conservation Colorado CEO Kelly Nordini said in a statement to The Sum & Substance that her group’s top priority will be educating voters this year about what it considers to be the dangers of the ballot measure. Initiative 177 would represent the first time a state enshrines in its constitution a right to buy and sell one particular product, and she believes it could leave utility customers on the hook for new methane-gas infrastructure required by data centers, she said.
Beyond that, though, her group may pursue policies in future years via the Legislature or ballot if necessary to protect public safety and energy affordability, she said. And with Colorado prepared to greet a new governor in 2027 — Polis is barred by term limits from seeking re-election — many Capitol observers already had begun to wonder whether the 2024 deal truly would hold up throughout 2027.
A crowded ballot
“It is already legal to buy and sell methane gas,” Nordini wrote. “But this unprecedented and vague constitutional change would open the door for oil and gas companies — or even private individuals — to sue the state and local governments over current and future public-health, worker-safety and consumer regulations, claiming those regulations infringe on this new ‘right.’”
Leaders of the state’s two largest industry groups, the Colorado Oil & Gas Association and American Petroleum Institute Colorado, said Thursday that they have not taken a position on Initiative 177 and declined to comment on it. CRED Executive Director Dan Haley had said in May that his group would “oppose any energy-related ballot measure in 2026 and continue to seek time to allow all the new rules and regulations to work as intended.”
Initiative 177 is the seventh citizen-led ballot initiative approved for the November ballot — a septet that includes a proposal to boost roadway funding by about $700 million annually via the dedication of certain existing sales-tax revenues. The Secretary of State’s office is reviewing signatures on seven other submissions, including a proposal to change the state’s 4.4% income-tax rate on all businesses and residents to a graduated system in which companies and people that more money will pay rates as high as 9.5%.