The Mad Gas Rush

Maybe the ugliest preview of all is Wyoming's Upper Green River Basin, flanked by the Wind River Mountains on the east, the Gros Ventre and Hoback ranges on the north, and the Wyoming range on the west. Part of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and the largest big-game winter range south of Alaska, the basin links Grand Teton National Park with the Red Desert. Each fall, in the longest ungulate migration in the contiguous states,100,000 mule deer, elk, bighorn sheep, and pronghorn make their way down from the high country to spend the winter. The basin also sustains peregrines, golden eagles, imperiled Colorado River cutthroat trout, and the world's largest population of sage grouse, a species endangered in fact if not by fiat. No wildlife habitat in America is more important.

Already the basin is pocked with 4,100 gas wells. Still, the BLM is flinging around drilling permits like wedding rice, and it proposes as many as 10,000 new wells. In some areas 3-acre well pads are spaced every 20 acres, and companies are demanding, and apparently will get,

10-acre spacing. Restoration, if it's even attempted, doesn't work here either; 20-year-old well pads are still naked. In the harsh northern winter, birds and mammals tend to die if they're stressed by lights and noise from compressors, frac trucks, and drilling rigs. The state game and fish department reports that for every acre in the basin covered with well pads and drilling pads, elk abandon 97 acres. So the BLM has a rule that forbids drilling between November 15 and April 30. Essentially, it applies to everyone save those who find it inconvenient. For example, in the winter of 2002–2003 and up until this writing (mid-January), the regional BLM office in Pinedale, Wyoming, granted 87 requests for winter (big-game) range exemptions and issued 3 denials. During the same period it granted 182 requests for sage grouse exemptions and issued no denials.

Luna Leopold—an internationally known hydrologist, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and son of Aldo Leopold—has a cabin in the basin overlooking the New Fork River. When I asked him what he thought of all the gas development around him, he said this: “The sage grouse is already so diminished that it's very likely to be listed as endangered, and this is practically the only large area of sage grouse habitat left. All the wildlife links are being wrecked. I've flown over the place, and it's a disaster—absolute devastation.” A coalition of sportsmen and environmentalists is suing the BLM.

America desperately needs more energy. But it doesn't desperately need more natural gas. The overall demand for gas has been flat since 1996; in fact, it has been declining 2 percent per year. What's more, proven, economically recoverable reserves have increased in seven of the past eight years. In 2004 we have more known gas reserves than we had in 1990. So why the mad rush? With gas prices as high as they are, why not turn to renewable energy or, better yet, energy conservation. It would be far cheaper. But the Bush energy plan cuts funds for research into energy efficiency and alternative power by almost a third. “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue,” pronounces Cheney, but it shouldn't be the foundation of a “comprehensive energy policy.” And why, when the gas and oil industry is raking in record profits, are Americans being asked to sacrifice their last best fish and wildlife habitat to a White House scheme that further engorges the industry with billions in direct subsidies, loan guarantees, and tax breaks?

“The analogy I make is the oil-shale boom and bust in the early 1980s,” says Pete Morton, an economist retained by the Wilderness Society. “The industry made incredible projections—15 million barrels of oil a day for 200 years. But it didn't consider the cost of getting it out of the ground or the cost to the environment. People built all these houses and infrastructure, passed bonds for roads and sewers. And two weeks after Exxon pulled out of Rifle, Colorado, on Black Sunday [May 2, 1981], 10,000 people were unemployed. Now, 20 years later, it's déjà vu. All we're saying to the BLM is, ‘Do the math.' ”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, also under gas-at-any-cost marching orders, needs to do some math, too. In Bayfield, Colorado, I interviewed four local environmentalists—Dan Randolph, Mark Pearson, and Janine Fitzgerald, all of the San Juan Citizens Alliance, and Lisa Sumi of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project. The first thing they told me was they weren't against gas development—they just wanted it done right. They'd even settle for legally. We met at Fitzgerald's ranch, which abuts the San Juan National Forest's 40,000-acre HD Mountains Roadless Area—low foothills far more valuable to wildlife than the high rock and ice that make up most of the forest's designated wilderness. The HDs are sanctuary for wild turkeys, black bears, mule deer, elk, northern goshawks, mountain bluebirds, all manner of warblers, and some of the last old-growth ponderosa pine in the San Juan Mountains. But, in the first big test of its “roadless rule” forbidding such activity, the Forest Service is rushing to put in 297 gas wells, 10 compressors, and 60 miles of roads. Pearson spread out a map on which planned and existing gas wells in the San Juan Basin showed as black dots. Save for a dollop of green—one-tenth of one percent of the basin—the map looked as if it had been used to test shot patterns at a skeet range. The dollop of green was the HDs. “They want it all,” says Randolph.

Fitzgerald first testified against gas development in 1985, when she was 22. At that time she and her parents were the only ranchers in the room who expressed reservations. “Ranchers thought they were going to get rich,” she told me. “Now at public meetings the only people who want more gas development are employed by the industry. Ranchers lose cows that drink produced water. They lose water sources. Their pastures die off. And when they sell out, they find their property has been devalued.” Randolph doesn't agree with Blancett that the coalition of ranchers and environmentalists suing the Forest Service is an “unholy alliance.” He calls it a “natural alliance.”

As we hiked, Fitzgerald pointed out shards of ancient Indian pottery. The HDs contain at least 100 undamaged pre-Puebloan cultural sites. We made our way through pinyon and juniper and climbed past huge ponderosa pines, some bearing scars where Indians, apparently desperate for food, had cut into them to extract cambium. In a clearing I looked down on the ranch house of Fitzgerald's parents and watched their border collies romping through a pasture, lush for this country. High above and to the east I studied the forested ridge where 6 of the 10 compressors would be built, and I tried to imagine what they would sound like in this hushed valley and how their lights would look against the night sky. From this vantage point I could better appreciate the true impact of roads. In hilly country you don't connect two wells with a road laid out like a first-base line; you connect them with a road laid out like a spiral staircase, a road that takes you one crow mile via a bleeding, sloughing 5- or 10- or 15-mile gouge.

There have been no studies to show how much gas might lie beneath the HDs. And no one knows what long-term effects coal-bed methane drilling will have on other public resources. Again, it's an experiment.