This is the West that few Americans have ever seen. It is, as Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote in the November/December issue of Mother Jones, "a complex maze of draws and arroyos and interconnected natural drainages, places where water might linger after a prairie storm, giving life to late-summer flourishes of grass, or where it might rush away in tumult, down into the Powder River or the Tongue."
Stretching from northeastern Wyoming across the state line into Montana, the basin is a patchwork of private and federal land. But the federal government still hold the mineral rights to more than half the basin, including thousands of acres owned by ranchers. With those claims in hand, the Bureau of Land Management is ready to launch the biggest energy play in its history. Prodded by the Bush administration, the BLM has approved the drilling of 66,000 coalbed methane wells in the basin -- more than five per square mile.
And, as Chris Smith reported in an August article for MotherJones.com, BLM officials also foresee "nearly 25,000 miles of new roads, and 47,000 miles of pipelines, power lines and utility corridors."
"This landscape is going to be changed from an open prairie, high plains landscape to an industrial gas field of unprecedented scale," says Jill Morrison, an organizer with the Wyoming-based Powder River Basin Resource Council.
Morrison and other activists have brought the matter to national attention, arguing that the planned drilling scheme poses a threat to the arid region's water table, and the US Geological Survey openly admits that contamination has been a problem at other coalbed methane drilling sites. Last year, a consortium of property owners, ranchers, and environmentalists filed suit in federal court, claiming the BLM had ignored public concerns in drafting its initial drilling plan. A moratorium on drilling was declared, and the bureau was ordered to review its scheme. Less than six months later, Smith reports, the BLM released its revised plan.
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