The Mad Gas Rush
By Ted Williams
Audubon.org
3-2-4
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 gasóconventional 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
stateóespecially 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
ingredientsó72,000 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.
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 ***** 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.)
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.
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 2002ñ2003 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 disasteróabsolute 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 deja vu. All we're saying to the BLM is, 'Do the
math.'"
"Our water is polluted; our air is polluted; our ground is polluted.
They've ruined our ranch."
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 environmentalistsóDan
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 Areaólow 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
greenóone-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.
It's commonly believed that the HD Mountains were named for the
Hatcher-***** (HD) Cattle Company, except that - although there were a
bunch of cattle running around with HD brands - there never was a
Hatcher or a ***** anywhere near the area. In the mid-1880s the feds
decided that the southern Utes - hunter-gatherers who each fall
followed elk and deer down from what is now the Weminuche Wilderness -
needed to be ranchers. So the agency gave them 3,000 head of cattle
branded with an ID, for Interior Department. Another, far more
credible, explanation for the sudden appearance of the HD brand has
been offered by local historians: It was the work of rustlers who
edited the ID with a vertical and a horizontal bar. At any rate,
neither the Interior Department nor the Beaver Creek Land Company
(which owned the HD brand) had any idea how all these cattle might
affect the native ecosystem. It was an experiment. The cattle ate
everything they could eat, nuking the HDs, which haven't fully
recovered to this day. Then they died, the wildlife starved, the
Indians were moved onto reservations, and the Beaver Creek Land
Company went belly-up.
In the 1940s an old man appeared in Bayfield and announced that he was
going to hike back into the HD range, where he'd worked as a young
foreman. "Bring plenty of water," the locals told him. They stared at
him condescendingly when he explained that this wasn't necessary,
because the country was full of springs. When he stumbled out later
that day he said only this: "My heart is broken."
"We changed the ecology of the West," declared Fitzgerald as we pushed
our way through old, spindly gambel oaks that should have been robust
trees. "We didn't know what we were doing back then. But now we do
know, and we're behaving the same way."
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