The Mad Gas Rush

Extract as much gas and oil as possible as fast as possible, at any cost to fish and other wildlife and with enormous subsidies to industry at a time of record profits. That pretty much sums up the Bush administration's “energy policy,” hatched in secret with the energy companies themselves. Currently the administration is devising ways to overcome what it calls “impediments” to energy development and what the rest of society calls environmental laws. Although the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) must manage the public's land for multiple use, the BLM has been instructed that developing gas and oil is its number-one priority, and the Forest Service is behaving as if it has the same directive. Moreover, Interior Secretary Gale Norton has decreed (illegally, according to the environmental community) that the BLM can no longer designate wilderness or protect “wilderness study areas” anywhere, even in Alaska.

In an effort to convert the gas and oil industry's wish list to law, the administration seems to have temporarily shelved its unpopular plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So distracted are the media by this move that they're paying scant attention to the administration's plans for the Rocky Mountain West.

And that rankles Tweeti Blancett, a rancher who calls herself a “cowgirl” and sits on New Mexico's Livestock Board and whose husband, Linn, is a director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association. Linn's great-grandfather, a scout for the U.S. Army, came into the San Juan Basin with Kit Carson in the 1870s, and the family has run cattle here ever since. “If you want to see what the West will look like, take a good look at this valley,” Tweeti Blancett told me on the morning of December 8, 2003, as she loaded a PowerPoint program at her Aztec, New Mexico, office. Five days earlier she had given the same “preview” to the Sierra Club, the very outfit that has called her profession “welfare ranching” and tried to get cows off public range.

“The amount of mortality that the deer are experiencing seems high. We need to strongly encourage industry to minimize their destruction of sagebrush parks and other areas of forage.”

But the devastation chronicled on Blancett's computer screen had been caused by gas and oil companies, not cattle. As hideous as it was, what impressed me more was that it had been sufficient to drive her into the arms of people she loathed. “An unholy alliance,” she calls it. Tweeti Blancett is about as Republican as you get, even in New Mexico. In 2000 she had been a campaign coordinator for George W. Bush. During two senate races (though not the last) she had stumped for U.S. Senator Pete Domenici.

Most of the oil has been pumped out of the Rocky Mountain West. What's left is gas—conventional and coal-bed methane. With the latter, a technology barely 15 years old and therefore an experiment on public resources, you have to bust up the coal seam and pump out groundwater contaminated with a witch's brew of toxins and carcinogens. Ranchers aren't safe even if they graze their own land because, in virtually all cases, subsurface mineral rights were sold or leased to gas and oil companies at least half a century ago. The companies routinely drill in front yards and backyards. A recent study reveals that if you have a gas well within 500 feet of your house, your property value declines 22 percent.

“These guys made $4.5 billion in San Juan County last year,” continued Blancett. “But they barely do any site restoration; they want everything. And in the San Juan Basin there are three BLM enforcement agents to cover 35,000 wells. We either have droughts or gully washers, so when you disturb desert soil and don't revegetate, you lose it. This whole county is a disaster area. Our water is polluted; our air is polluted; our ground is polluted. They've ruined our ranch. With $4.5 billion coming out of one county in one year, New Mexico ought to be the richest state, not one of the poorest.”

Photos can deceive, so I asked rancher Chris Velasquez of Blanco to show me his grazing allotment on the Rosa Mesa, 45 miles south of Aztec. Like Blancett's ranch, this is high, fragile desert, but it contains some of the most important wildlife habitat in the state—especially for mule deer and elk seeking winter refuge from higher, colder country to the north. Velasquez says that because he adores wildlife, he returned 10,000 acres of his 32,000-acre grazing allotment. Now it's growing gas wells and weeds. The Rosa is part of the BLM's Farmington District, in which there are 83,500 acres disturbed by gas extraction, 15,000 miles of roads, and 18,000 gas wells. On top of this the administration is proposing development that will create 44,300 additional acres of disturbance, 805 miles of new roads, and 9,942 new wells. By comparison, there are about 50,000 producing gas wells on public land in the entire West.

With this development will come 12,200 new wellhead compressors (stations that suck up the gas) and 319 larger compressors, which serve many wells at once through a web of pipes. Most of the compressors I inspected ran on motors powered by the gas itself. The bigger ones, sprawling tangles of tanks and pipes the size of small factories, are lit up at night like baseball parks, and they sound like a Laundromat washing cowboy belts.

“Clean natural gas” dirties up everything but your furnace. Already the Farmington District is flirting with the air-pollution limit for ozone, and each year the new gas wells will create more of ozone's key ingredients—72,000 tons of nitrogen oxide and 3,000 tons of volatile organic compounds. When the wells are operating, 88 percent of the wildlife in the district will be within a quarter-mile of a road. We walked around gas wells from one to eight years old. By law they were to have been revegetated, but all were bare or, worse, infested with Russian thistle and other noxious weeds that were spreading to undisturbed areas and choking out forage for wildlife and livestock.