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Industry Laments Hurdles to Development    [

    A Reprieve for Public Lands
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Tuesday 08 August 2006

    In the spring of 2003, Gale Norton, then secretary of the interior, and Michael Leavitt, then governor of Utah, struck a deal that removed federal protection from about 2.6 million acres of land that the Clinton administration had designated as potential wilderness. In fairly short order, the Bureau of Land Management began selling oil and gas leases on some of these lands as part of a larger energy policy that called for aggressive exploration and drilling even in the most fragile of Western landscapes.

    That policy has now suffered its first serious reversal. Last week, a federal district court in Utah ruled that leases on 16 parcels had violated federal environmental law. Among other transgressions, the bureau had ignored its own finding, in 1999, that the lands in question possessed "wilderness values" deserving of protection. The decision has also thrown into question every lease sale in Utah involving wilderness-quality lands over the last three years, involving 125,000 acres altogether, as well as similar sales in Colorado that were also undertaken without the environmental reviews required by law.

    With any luck, the decision will send a signal to Ms. Norton's successor, Dirk Kempthorne, that the administration's policy of indiscriminately fast-tracking leases in fragile areas needs a fresh look. This policy is not only unpopular but unnecessary. More than four-fifths of the known oil and gas reserves in the Rocky Mountain West are already open for drilling. And industry already has more leases than it knows what to do with; of the 36 million acres under lease nationwide, only about 12 million are actually in production.

    No one can expect Mr. Kempthorne to abandon basic administration doctrine. But at the least he can require his own agency to behave legally and responsibly.

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    Industry Laments Hurdles to Development
    By Judith Kohler
    The Associated Press

    Tuesday 08 August 2006

    Denver - The Rockies, from Montana to Mexico, are the single greatest source of untapped domestic energy in the lower 48 states, and the oil and gas industry needs to do more so lawsuits and other obstacles don't tie up vital resources on Western public lands, speakers at an energy conference said Monday.

    Although environmentalists and people facing drilling on or near their land believe the pace of energy development is skyrocketing, industry representatives said they face too many obstacles.

    "Through lawsuits and other actions, it's more and more difficult to get leases on public land," Duane Zavadil of the Bill Barrett Corp. said during a summit sponsored in part by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Association, a trade group.

    The Rockies hold 224 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or 41 percent of the reserves in the lower 48, Zavadil said. About 70 percent of the region's minerals are on federal land, he added.

    "In most other countries that would be considered a good thing. We'd have some self determination in our source of natural gas," Zavadil said. "But the federal land management is in fact imposing requirements that limit access to 137 (trillion cubic feet) of that 224 tcf."

    Creating more obstacles is litigation by environmental groups and protests of leases issued by the US Bureau of Land Management, said attorney Bret Sumner of the Washington-based law firm of Fulbright and Jaworski. He encouraged energy companies to get involved early and help head off lawsuits by hiring outside experts versed in "sound science" and pointing out potential problems to public officials.

    The industry also needs to get its message to the public in the face of growing alliances among traditional environmentalists and hunter and anglers, said Ken Wonstolen, senior vice president and general counsel for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. He said while the groups typically have different political viewpoints, "it's an effective marriage of convenience right now."

    "It's something we have to address very seriously in this industry," Wonstolen said.

    Other worrisome signs include calls by such typically pro-industry politicians as Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., and Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., for limits on drilling, Wonstolen said.

    Thomas has said national forests generally should be off-limits to drilling. Burns has proposed legislation banning new energy development on federal lands along Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, which environmentalists and hunting and fishing groups want left alone.

    The Rockies are experiencing an energy boom, with record rates of new gas wells and hundreds of thousands of acres of leases issued on federal land. BLM officials have said they're struggling to keep up with the number of drilling permit applications, which increased 27 percent between 2004 and 2006.

    A report released last year by the Government Accountability Office found the BLM is so busy processing energy permits that workers are having trouble meeting their responsibility to care for wildlife, cultural resources and the environment.

    Nada Culver, an attorney with The Wilderness Society, said the figures tell a different story from the one told by the industry.

    "There have been very few lawsuits actually brought on these issues," Culver said. "If you actually looked at the number of acres of federal and public land, especially BLM land, made available to oil and gas leasing, the total acreage (litigated) would be a very small percentage."

    Industry officials, though, pointed to protests filed on proposed leases. In Colorado, protests have been filed on 131 of the 158 parcels covering nearly 170,000 acres to be offered in an oil and gas lease auction Thursday.

    Sumner noted that a federal judge last week struck down the leasing of more than a dozen parcels in Utah, saying the BLM didn't consider the wilderness characteristics of the land.