An Interesting Revenue Source for Denver

On this blog I've written here before about sources of revenues, but recently Denver announced one of the more interesting ones - the airport has purchased 27 oil and natural gas wells on airport property that it was previously leasing to Petro-Canada Resources (USA) Inc. for $5.5 million. The wells will provide approximately $3.5 million in additional annual revenue for the airport. Overall, the airport owns or operates 76 wells.

The airport's John Ackerman said in a press release that "this deal is very good for DIA and our airline partners, because improving our non-airline revenue sources helps to keep costs down for our carriers, which in turn helps us grow air service to the Denver market." This is definitely unique, but not only to Denver - DFW has oil on its property, too.

Meanwhile, the airport reported its best Janauary ever, with traffic of 3,776,403 passengers, a year-over-year increase of 2.9%. It's certainly good to see that from an economic perspective, but of course, Denver travelers have also been benefiting from competition for a few years now. United is still the dominant carrier, though.