Wyoming Range drilling proposal could signal new era

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

By Melanie Stein

Jackson Hole, Wyo--Next week, the Bridger Teton-National Forest will host two public meetings to discuss the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Eagle Prospect Exploratory Drilling project. Meetings will be held 4-7 p.m. on Tuesday in the Pioneer Room at the Virginian Lodge in Jackson, and 4-7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18, at the Public Library in Pinedale.

Plains Energy & Production Company has held a lease on the land seven miles southeast of Bondurant in the Wyoming Range for many years and has opted to explore the area for oil and natural gas. Plains Energy has proposed to drill three exploratory wells on National Forest Service land to a depth of 12,500 feet to test for the presence of commercial quantities of natural gas.

To do so, Plains Energy will need to build and upgrade roads to allow them to access the drilling site and construct a temporary above-ground pipeline to transport any discovered oil or natural gas.

The Forest Service released the DEIS for the Plains Energy project at the end of February and the comment period extends through April 30.

“Right now public participation is key,” said Nina Luxmoore, the Jackson representative for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a conservation group that works to protect the lands, waters and wildlife of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

“I’m concerned about the Jackson [meeting] because it couldn’t be more in the middle of spring break.

“With the Pinedale Anticline and Jonah Field growing, this is the next place they’re headed,” Luxmoore continued. “We think they’re going too far, drilling in a national forest, a roadless area, and summer range for these animals. [They’re] messing up the winter range already with the Jonah Field.”

GYC is working in conjunction with other environmental groups and, to the surprise of many, outfitting and hunting groups that also want to keep the Wyoming Range free of oil and gas drilling. Once such group, Citizens Protecting the Wyoming Range, formed after one concerned citizen – Gary Amerine – began a dialog with his neighbors about oil and gas leases.

“They were just sort of astounded that the Forest Service was giving up parts of the forest for drilling,” said Amerine, acting chair of the group. “Typically outfitters and quote-unquote ‘environmental groups’ don’t work on things together. After meeting with them and setting aside other issues … [I decided that] if I worked with them, it would be a better plan of attack. So we banded together to see what we could do to stop the leases.”

The coalition was successful in blocking some leases – about 44,000 acres worth – on Bureau of Land Management Land by filing formal protests.

“The problem with the Eagle Prospect project is those particular leases were offered quite a while ago, prior to the BLM being required to send out notices to affected land owners,” Amerine said. “Most people didn’t feel like they’d ever start drilling in the forest.”

Citizens Protecting the Wyoming Range is a coalition of sportsmen, outfitters, ranchers, property owners and conservationists working to prevent exploratory drilling in the Wyoming Range and stop the issuance of any new leases, among other things.

“The outfitting and ranching businesses are renewable,” Amerine said. “Our type of intrusion into the forest is not something that leaves a scar on it that will last for generations. If development starts and proceeds, the scars that are left will be there for generations to come.”

GYC agrees. “They’re looking at full-field development and that’s hidden in the DEIS,” Luxmoore said. “They are transforming the area from a roadless, wilderness area to an industrial site.”

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, frequently referred to as the Roadless Act, is a federal ruling that aims to protect the remaining wild areas within national forests, making the land off-limits to nearly all road-building and logging. The Plains Energy project is within the Grayback Ridge roadless area.

But Plains Energy holds an old lease, Amerine said. “Once the Forest Service issues the lease, they’re under obligation to let that leaseholder proceed … That lease was done long enough ago that the Roadless Act wasn’t even brought into the process.”

Both Amerine and Luxmoore’s primary concern with the Plains Energy project is that it will open the floodgates of oil and gas drilling elsewhere on the Bridger-Teton and in the Wyoming Range.

“If they are successful – you know they get through the DEIS process and start drilling – I have a feeling there’s going to be a great amount of pressure put on the Forest Service to continue with these leases,” Amerine said.

There are many leases of Forest Service lands that date back to the 1960s but that have been suspended at the leaseholder’s request. Amerine believes that if Plains Energy moves forward, many suspended leases will be reopened.

“There are some leases in the Gros Ventre Wilderness [leased] before the Wilderness Act,” he said. “People just don’t realize that there’s huge amounts of ground that have been identified as leasable areas for oil and gas development.”

To prevent this rush, GYC and Citizens Protecting the Wyoming Range, among others, are working to pass federal legislation that would halt the lease and bar the land from being leased again.

“Our ultimate hope is that we could get federal legislation and start buying out some of the leases,” Luxmoore said. A similar approach was successful in Montana.
In some ways, the Plains Energy project seems harmless in comparison to the energy development in Sublette County.

“Really, what they’re looking at is some upgrades of existing roads on the forest and a couple of miles of new road construction,” said Greg Clark, district ranger for the Big Piney District of the BTNF. “Then they’re going to put one pad in and from that pad drill three wells.”

The well pad will be approximately 6.5 acres in size, Clark said, when the company first starts drilling. He also noted that if Plains Energy finds oil or natural gas, the size of the well pad would actually shrink, as pads are largest during drilling.

Additionally, he pointed out, the Forest Service plans to leave the access road to the drill site open to the public; this road is well-traveled by hunters during the fall.

But fears of widespread energy development aside, Amerine believes even this one project, if approved, would damage his and others’ outfitting businesses.
“As an outfitter, I’m going to be hard-pressed to get clients to take them into an area where this energy development is ongoing.”

To read the DEIS, go to http://www.fs.fed.us/r4/btnf/projects/ and scroll down to 2007 NEPA projects.
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Wyoming Range drilling proposal could signal new era | Planet JH News Article: General Environment

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