The Mad Gas Rush

As the previous night's snow melted, the dirt around each wellhead and compressor turned to mud the consistency of mortar. Several pounds of it stuck to each of my shoes, making me feel as if I were wearing leaking chest waders. At one site pinyons and junipers had been killed or sickened by the coal dust that still covered them and by flames from leaking gas, burned off during drilling. Columns of weeds marched up hills and along ridges, following buried pipelines.

Pump jacks, pecking the earth like giant flickers, removed contaminated groundwater (“produced water,” as it's called), which is supposed to be stored in tanks and trucked away but often leaks or gets dumped. Sometimes the compressors drip toxic antifreeze. In this arid land, any standing liquid is swilled by cattle and wildlife. Cattle owned by Velasquez, Blancett, and other ranchers are regularly poisoned. Once Velasquez lost eight cows in seven days. Frequently the cows don't even make it off the well pad. Deer, elk, and small mammals travel farther before they die, but their carcasses show up regularly, too.

“The amount of mortality that the deer are experiencing in the Rosa, in particular Eul Basin, seems high to me,” comments BLM biologist John Hansen. He suspects two main causes—“drinking produced water and other liquid by-products at well locations” and a reduction in natural forage, forcing a diet of plants that kill stomach bacteria, thereby causing starvation. “I believe we need to do all that we possibly can to restore and/or maintain what browse we have,” he says. “We need to strongly encourage industry to minimize their destruction of sagebrush parks and other areas of deer forage.”

But resource biologists only make recommendations. Instead of “encouraging” good behavior from industry, BLM policy makers are following White House orders to suspend rules that protect wildlife—for example, restrictions on drilling during winter, when ungulates are stressed and desperately conserving calories. The Clinton administration strictly enforced the restrictions. But now, when companies ask for exemptions, the BLM spits them out like tollbooth tickets. Lately agency field offices have been granting about 85 percent of the wildlife exemptions requested. Farmington is stricter, granting “only” about 75 percent, but Hansen expects more leniency because of an increase in designated “critical big-game habitat” in the new regional management plan.

Deep in the Rosa we came across a cluster of a dozen wells, a few hundred yards from one another. With a modest investment for diagonal drilling, every site could have been reached from a single well pad. But despite the BLM's multiple-use mandate, a square mile of habitat had been sacrificed. When a coal seam has been dewatered, the gas can go anywhere it wants—sometimes to the wellhead and sometimes to surface vents. Occasionally it drives people permanently from their homes. The previous morning I'd been assailed by the stench of rotten eggs when I'd stopped to read poison-gas warning signs along the state's “gold medal” trout section of the Animas River. It was hydrogen sulfide leaking from fractured, dewatered coal seams along with methane and other gases. But smelling rotten eggs is good; it means you're not going to get poisoned right away. If the smell gets sweet, hit the dirt and crawl fast, because you're one breath from death.

The BLM doesn't do meaningful gas-field enforcement, but when an environmental group called the San Juan Citizens Alliance offered to help out by designing an information packet on how to identify violations, BLM officials were horrified. Such info in the hands of hikers, hunters, birdwatchers, and the like might “encourage” them to venture onto their property, thereby exposing them to deadly gases. In other words, the public can't use its land because it's reserved for industry. Such is multiple use in action.

Rivers like the Animas and the San Juan are receiving major sedimentation from gas-field soil disturbance. Where Navajo Dam disgorges the San Juan River (just as muddy now as when I had floated it in August), we encountered a gas well perched atop three acres of sticky mud, and a reeking, coal-stained wastewater pit the size of an Olympic swimming pool that was easily accessible to waterfowl and other wildlife. The crude fence was down, but even when it had been up, deer or elk could have stepped over it. “Look at that,” Velasquez declared. “Right next to the tarred road.” That's the kind of faith the gas and oil industry has in BLM's non-enforcement.

The bigger compressors, 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.

Late in the day we pulled off the road to make way for a dozen “frac trucks” the size of school buses, heading into the Rosa. Frac trucks pump fluids into the earth at high pressure to fracture coal seams and release the methane. Because frac fluids contain and/or pick up benzene and other dangerous poisons, they can pollute groundwater. But the Bush energy plan exempts fracing from Safe Drinking Water Act standards—this despite the fact that an Environmental Protection Agency study had warned that fracing could endanger the public by contaminating aquifers. Offering no scientific basis other than “feedback” from industry, Bush's EPA changed the data to indicate that fracing wasn't a problem after all. In the final draft of the White House National Energy Policy, the administration deleted the whole section on fracing, including information on how it pollutes drinking water. The leading producer of frac fluids is the Halliburton Company, the gas and oil giant formerly run by Vice-President Dick Cheney and which, according to his most recent financial disclosures, paid him deferred payments of at least $1.7 million in 2001 and at least $177,393 in 2002.

Despite the effusions of Tweeti Blancett, the San Juan Basin isn't the only, or even the most graphic, preview of what the West will look like under Bush's energy plan. For example, the 13-million-acre Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, which sustains about 157,000 mule deer, 109,000 pronghorn, and 12,000 elk, is ventilated by about 10,000 coal-bed methane wells. (See “Powder Keg,” Audubon, December 2002 - http://magazine.audubon.org/features0212/dispatch.html.) Still, on January 21 Secretary Norton announced she intended to triple the BLM's annual allotment of gas-drilling permits in Wyoming, from 1,000 to 3,000. In all, the administration proposes 66,000 new wells, 26,000 miles of new roads, 52,000 miles of new pipelines, and 1,000 new compressors. The dewatering of coal is drying up aquifers, springs, and creeks. The disposal of produced water is killing forage for wildlife and livestock; wiping out plant communities; sterilizing soil; polluting rivers; and jeopardizing trout, smallmouth bass, walleye, channel catfish, and the imperiled sturgeon chub. As in New Mexico, ranchers have been driven into the arms of environmentalists. Together they're suing the BLM.