To my jaundiced and hungry
eye, the federal Bureau of Land Management, which manages oil and
gas development on public lands in the West, is looking more and
more like a McDonald’s franchise.
I first noticed it last
January during a trip to Denver. At the McDonald’s in Glenwood
Springs, Colo., the sign under the arches read “Over 99 billion
served.” But McDonald’s isn’t just about the high-volume dispensing
of cheap fuel; it’s also about slapping a burger together and
getting it to the customer fast. A few days later, at a
McDonald’s in Golden, I spied a sign behind the counter that
read: “Order Assembly Target: 12-16 seconds.”
It was then
that the parallels with the BLM began suggesting themselves. On
April 11, 2003, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who oversees the
BLM, and then-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt reached an out-of-court
settlement that lifted interim protections for lands Utah citizens’
groups had identified as being eligible for wilderness designation.
Soon after, the BLM began auctioning off those wilderness-quality
lands for oil and gas development, not just in Utah, but across the
West. Since the 2003 wilderness settlement, the BLM has auctioned
off more than 148,000 acres of these publicly proposed lands.
The aggressive oil and gas development program isn’t
limited to just wilderness-quality lands. In 2002, the BLM’s
Buffalo field office in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin received a
“Unit Award for Excellence of Service” for granting more
applications to drill wells than the rest of the BLM combined, with
the exception of New Mexico.
Then, in 2004, the Buffalo
office broke its own record when it issued 2,720 well-drilling
permits.
At the same time, the agency ordered the Buffalo
field office to trim its permitting turnaround time to 46 days.
It’s not exactly a 12-to-16-second Order Assembly Target, but it
makes you wonder whether the BLM had lifted a few pages straight
out of the McDonald’s handbook.
The federal injunction to
speed up the drilling on public lands is reminiscent of the federal
government’s massive land giveaways to railway corporations as an
incentive for building the Transcontinental Railway in the 1860s.
The historian Vernon Parrington, writing shortly before his death
in the late 1920s, called the phenomenon “the Great Barbecue.”
Today, the Great Barbecue has returned, but this time
it’s a drive-through, a McDonaldized version where the government
simply slaps the meat on the hot, electrified griddle and shovels
it out the window. It is still close to a giveaway.
The
average price for a lease on an acre of BLM land is $64.23. The
minimum bid is $2 per acre — a dollar less than the average
cost of a Big Mac. The average annual return to the government in
the form of royalties on producing leases is $142.10 per acre.
In terms of their wilderness potential, many of these
wildlands are prime cut. But for the oil and gas industry, they’re
the last, fatty scraps, because they’ll yield only marginal amounts
of oil and gas. At such cheap prices, however, it’s easy for oil
and gas companies to buy up what they can, sink a few exploratory
wells and, for the most part, use the leases to pad their value and
make them more attractive to buyers.
Take the case of a
citizen-proposed wilderness in northwest Colorado called Big Ridge.
In 1997, Amoco drilled a dry hole there in what would, in 2001, be
nominated as a citizen-proposed wilderness. In November 2003, seven
months after the Norton-Leavitt wilderness settlement, El Paso
Corp. drilled another dry hole — which the industry calls a
“duster” — just 200 feet from the six-year-old Amoco hole.
Then it abandoned its efforts.
Nonetheless, the lease is
still valuable to El Paso. According to Forbes
magazine, El Paso is desperately trying to “pay down a debt load
that ballooned as high as $24 billion after failed expansions into
Enron-style energy trading and wholesale power generation.” Selling
off leases such as Big Ridge could help reduce some of that debt.
For energy corporations, however, the fast track could
slow down. On Jan. 12, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver
will begin hearing a challenge to the Norton-Leavitt wilderness
settlement. Environmental groups have argued that the deal unfairly
excluded the public.
Meanwhile, it doesn’t take much for
rampant well-drilling and lease-trading to turn potential
wilderness into the public-lands equivalent of ground beef. In the
end, the public won’t be left with much more than a sizzling, fatty
mess and a bunch of smoke.
Matt Jenkins is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org) in Paonia, Colorado, where he is
an assistant editor of the paper.
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