From the air, part of New
Mexico’s Carson National Forest looks like a spider web
that’s been carved into the landscape. Here on the
33,000-acre Jicarilla District, more than 700 gas wells and a maze
of over 400 miles of associated roads crisscross the land.
While companies have been leasing this New Mexico forest
for gas development since the 1950s, the federal government has
doubled the well density in the past five years, from one well
every 320 acres, to one well every 160 acres. Over the next 20
years, the number of wells in the area will double, says Mark
Linden, the Forest Service’s regional geologist.
The impact to the land has been significant. Traffic seems
constant, with trucks hauling water from gas wells and oil company
employees driving to read meters. A fine layer of sandstone dust
rises from the dirt roads in a haze; in places, litter covers the
ground.
This is the landscape of the West’s latest
energy boom. In the past six years, oil and gas companies have
nearly quadrupled the number of drilling permit applications
they’ve submitted to the federal government. That’s
translated into the Bureau of Land Management issuing an
unprecedented number of drilling permits for public lands in Utah,
Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. In fiscal years 2004 and
2005, the agency handed out over 6,000 new permits each year.
“I’ve seen the most dramatic change you can imagine
in the past three years,” says Bruce Gordon, president of
EcoFlight, who has flown throughout the West for over 20 years.
“Fly 30 miles in any direction in the Rocky Mountain West, and you
see oil and gas drilling rigs and wells and the network of roads
that accompany them. It’s out of control.”
On-the-ground inspection is minimal. In the past six years, BLM
field offices, which are also responsible for Forest Service lands,
met their annual environmental inspection goals only about half of
the time, according to a June 2005 Government Accountability Office
report. Buffalo, Wyo., is the field office with the highest
drilling-permit workload, and it achieved only 27 percent of its
environmental inspection goals in fiscal year 2004.
Public-land agencies don’t have nearly enough people to
contend with the new workload. While the Southwestern region in New
Mexico has hired a few additional people in the past several years,
the Intermountain region, based in Utah, hasn’t been that
lucky, says Barry Burkhardt, assistant director for minerals and
geology. “We’re defaulting to staff people that don’t
have the level of experience that would raise my comfort level,” he
says.
Yet the solution for some field offices is
troubling. In the past few years, some field offices in Nevada,
Wyoming and Utah have used consultants to conduct environmental
reviews; these consultants were paid by the Independent Petroleum
Association of Mountain States, a lobbying group for the oil and
gas industry.
Even if there were more competently trained
field officers, the law doesn’t offer much of a security
blanket. In most cases, the BLM has to inspect oil and gas wells
only once every three years to check for leaks, road erosion or
other environmental problems.
If, in all that
unsupervised time, something goes badly wrong, there isn’t
enough money set aside to clean up the damage to land, water or
air. Current bond regulations date back to 1960, and only require
$10,000 per lease, regardless of how many wells are drilled. Often,
there are as many as four wells drilled per permit. The difference
between the amount covered by a bond and actual cleanup could cost
taxpayers as much as $1 billion, according to a 2004 Associated
Press analysis of federal records.
It’s as if we
were creating the conditions for a fire without any fire hydrants,
and it’s almost certain to result in future problems. I have
no right to complain about oil and gas development, of course. I
like energy. I take long hot showers. I adore my electric waffle
maker. I like a house with lots of lights on. I’m not proud
of this, but until we start developing renewable energy like solar
and wind, we’re stuck with our dependence on oil and gas.
Even so, we can take better precautions as we drill.
We’ve been in this pickle before with logging, damming and
over-grazing, but we keep finding ourselves surprised by the
unintended consequences.
Rebecca Clarren is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). She writes about environmental
issues in Portland, Oregon.
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