A Managed Disaster?
News: After careful review, the Bureau of Land Management has decided it was right all along about opening the Powder River Basin to coalbed methane drilling.
August 11, 2003
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To get a feel for the layout of a natural gas field, you need to get some distance from it. At ground level, you can't see more than a wellhead, or a string of power lines marching toward the horizon. Seen from the air, however, the full picture begins to emerge: a latticework of service roads, compressors, pipelines, and power lines connecting dozens or hundreds of wells.
This is also the reality of coalbed methane drilling -- the natural gas industry's current obsession, and an integral part of the Bush administration's national energy policy. And it looks increasingly likely that it will be the future of the Powder River Basin -- an unspoiled expanse of rolling prairie and low hills straddling the Wyoming-Montana border.
"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. From her home near the 12,500-square-mile Basin's western edge, in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, Morrison has watched coalbed methane drilling steadily take hold. And Morrison's dire predictions are based on more than just what she's seen happen already.
From Montana to New Mexico, coalbed methane drilling has spread rapidly through the mountain West. But much of that drilling has been on private or state property. For the past two years, the Bush administration has pressed to open hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land to drilling. The biggest prize in that campaign is the Powder River Basin. Now, according to twin environmental impact statements completed by the Bureau of Land Management this spring, the Basin is in line for up to 66,000 new wells -- more than five wells per square mile. And, along with the wells, BLM officials foresee nearly 25,000 miles of new roads, and 47,000 miles of pipelines, power lines and utility corridors. All told, it will be the biggest natural gas play in the Bureau's history.
Shortly after the Bureau finalized the plans, a consortium of property owners, ranchers, and environmental groups -- Morrison's among them -- filed suit in federal court, claiming that the Bureau had ignored concerns raised by the public. The suit argues that the BLM plans trample the property rights of local landowners, and fail to protect the Basin's water and air. For the time being, the legal challenge has slowed the rush to drill. But no one knows how long the court-imposed calm will last. With the nation facing a natural gas shortage, the pressure from Washington is only intensifying.
Last year, preliminary versions of the dual impact statements prompted an outcry that reached well beyond the Powder River region. Local groups accused the Bureau of downplaying or ignoring many of the project's most serious consequences. The Environmental Protection Agency weighed in, giving the statements an "environmentally unsatisfactory" rating. Newspapers from California to New York published editorials calling for the Bush administration to temper its thirst to drill. The pressure paid off: A moratorium on new drilling was declared, and the Bureau went back to the drawing board.
Now, with national attention firmly elsewhere, the bureau has returned with its revised plans, ready to lift the moratorium. According to Morrison and others opposed to the drilling initiative, the new plans hew painfully close to the old ones. While conceding that some small changes for the better have been made, Morrison and others point out that the bureau hasn't changed its industry-friendly recommendation for drilling the maximum number of wells possible. Nor has it suggested workable remedies for -- or even fully explored, in some cases -- the potentially devastating impacts on the region's water, noise and air quality.
Ultimately, environmentalists say, the Bureau's new plans offer the same sort of blank check to the energy industry that the first plans did.
"I think the [Bureau] has clearly caved in to the pressure from the oil and gas industry and the Bush administration to drill as many wells as fast as possible with as few environmental safeguards as possible," says Gwen Lachelt, executive director of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project in Durango, Colo., also home to significant coalbed methane development.
For its part, the bureau concedes that there are few major differences between the draft and final versions of the statements. But BLM officials say there's a good reason for that: the original conclusions were sound, and now they have the data to back those conclusions up.
"As we basically redid the analysis, it didn't really change all that much," says Paul Beels, project manager at the bureau's field office in Buffalo, Wyoming.
The bureau also maintains that its impact studies have been as thorough as possible. "We did a good job, a better job than we did last time," says Dave McIlnay, field manager for the Bureau's Miles City, Mt. Office.
While BLM officials may be satisfied, critics cite a long list of outstanding issues. Topping that list is the bureau's prescription for handling the huge amounts of waste water that coalbed methane drilling generates. The industry's preferred approach -- also the cheapest approach -- is to simply pour the water onto the surface. The Bureau embraced this approach in its preliminary statements. Critics, though, have pointed to the sheer waste: more than a trillion gallons of water would be pumped out of the arid region's meager aquifer, drawing down the water table and potentially drying up wells throughout the Basin. What' more, they claim, most of the water won't be fit for any other use after the drillers get done with it.
Much of the water produced by drilling is so full of mineral salts and heavy metals -- each well produces 20 tons of salts per year, according to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality -- that it actually poses a threat to the soil, wildlife, and crops.
"I'm seeing some damages already from what they're dumping in, and they're wanting to dump in more," says Mark Fix, a Montana rancher, farmer and member of the Northern Plains Resource Council, a local sustainable use group. The salt content in his water has tripled in the last two years, he says. If it rises much higher, it will begin to kill anything he plants.
The bureau's new solution is to store the waste water in thousands of open-air pits, each covering an average of six acres. Far cheaper than reclamation methods proposed by environmentalists, the pits are also almost wholly untested. Bureau planners envision the water slowly filtering harmlessly back into the ground, losing its toxic salts and heavy metals while replenishing the water table. Opponents point out an obvious flaw in the approach. While the water held in the basins may slowly filter into the ground, it will also evaporate rapidly in the dry region -- meaning that the mineral salts and other pollutants will become even more concentrated.
Tom Darin, Director of Public Lands and Resources for the Wyoming Outdoor Council, suggests that the bureau is playing a "smoke and mirrors" game. He says that the new plans are likely to have the same impacts as the previous solution, "just delayed over time. And possibly the water quality might be even worse."
Others, meanwhile, worry about what will happen when the wells are plugged. Though the bureau insists that its post-drilling efforts will be adequate, many point out that its clean-up record is spotty at best.
"This play is going to last 10, maybe 20 years," says Steve Jones, the Council's Watershed Protection Program Attorney. "And then the coalbed methane water is gone, the reservoirs are going to dry up and we're going to have these pock-marked, salt-rimmed, empty depressions all over the Powder River Basin."
Over the past year, several environmental groups have suggested alternative methods for handling the waste water, such as having it treated or injecting it deep underground, where it can be filtered as it slowly percolates back into the aquifer. The Bureau, by and large, has dismissed these ideas as either unworkable or uneconomical.
"That's just been lip service," Darin says.
One of the bureau's more obvious failings last year was its failure to even address air quality concerns. According to John Molenar, vice president of Air Resource Specialists, Inc., an air quality consulting firm, the new statements offer a much fuller disclosure. Unfortunately, he adds, that disclosure makes it clear that drilling will lead to huge increases in haze and dust in the Basin's air. And Molenar says the problem may never be addressed. Noting that the final say on permitting will come from state environmental officials in Montana and Wyoming, Molenar says that the bureau simply punted, secure in the knowledge that it didn't have to make the call.
"They hand-waved on that," he says. "That's what they did. You can argue that it's wrong, but they have the right." And Molenar says the states' records aren't encouraging. "They're going to permit everything they possibly can."
While conceding that the bureau must defer to the states, Wald says federal land managers didn't even try to resist the energy lobby's drill-happy impulses.
"Instead of asserting the authority they unquestionably have to manage development in an environmentally responsible manner, they have essentially thrown up their hands and said 'We'll do what industry wants.'" Opponents of the drilling plans say the evidence of a headlong rush to drill is obvious. A Bureau court filing from last year offers a glimpse into its priorities:
"Every month that wells are not drilled on federal lands in the Wyoming Powder River Basin, the United States loses valuable coalbed natural gas through drainage ... BLM estimates that the royalty value alone of the resource it is losing each month is about $1.4 million."
Even the National Park Service, the bureau's sister agency, has expressed dissatisfaction with the new impact statements. In a scathing letter of protest last December, the Park Service demanded that the bureau allow more time to study how methane drilling in the Powder River Basin will impact air quality in national treasures like Badlands and Mount Rushmore, which lie downwind.
"Our cursory review of the subject documents indicates that the concerns we raised in our April 12, 2002 comment remain unresolved. We are particularly concerned that the project may result in significant or potentially adverse impacts to several units of the National Park System."
Like many other opponents of the BLM drilling scheme, Morrison says the bureau simply doesn't want to spend the time and money to responsibly manage coalbed methane drilling. Backed by a White House eager to see the wells built, and lured by the promise of billions of dollars in new revenue, the bureau isn't about to let the worrisome reality of coalbed methane stand in its way, she says.
"They're completely sugarcoating it," she says. "We're in a state of denial about this, because [otherwise] we'd really have to deal with the consequences up-front. But what we want is the quick, short-term dollar. We want that money fast, and we're not gonna go in with our eyes open. We're gonna go in telling ourselves a fairy tale."
Image: AP/Wide World Photos
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