A more than sixfold increase in challenges to federal oil and gas leases has slowed the Bush administration’s plan to open more federal land to energy development, a top Interior Department official said Wednesday.
Challenges to individual leases rose to 4,425 this year from 664 in 2001. Appeals filed after the leases were issued increased to 925 from 266 during the same period.
The challenges – mainly from environmental groups and landowners – are clogging the permit process, said Rebecca Watson, assistant secretary of the Interior Department.
“They take time, and time is money,” Watson said at the Rocky Mountain Natural Gas Strategy Conference in Denver.
To speed the process, the federal Bureau of Land Management has changed its rules. Protests must now be filed at least 15 days before a lease-sale date, instead of up to the day before, Watson said.
“What they are trying to do is systematically cut the public out of the process,” said Pam Eaton, director of the Wilderness Society’s BLM Action Center in Denver.
The BLM will also get more money. The agency’s budget will increase to $90.3 million in 2006 – almost double the 1995 budget, Watson said.
A report last month by the Government Accountability Office, a congressional investigative agency, found that the bureau was so busy issuing permits that it has fallen behind on environmental inspections.
The BLM office in Buffalo, Wyo., did about one-quarter of its required environmental inspections in 2004, according to the report.
The administration gave the Buffalo office a target of 3,000 permit approvals in 2004. The office approved 2,435, the most in the nation, the report said.
Since 2001, the federal Bureau of Land Management has issued 17,000 drilling permits, a 74 percent increase over the last four years of the Clinton administration, Watson said.
In fiscal year 2004, natural-gas production on federal land in the Rocky Mountain West jumped to a record 3.1 trillion cubic feet, the federal Mineral Management Service reported.
About 35 percent of the natural gas produced in the U.S. comes from federal lands, according to the BLM.
Rocky Mountain basins hold the largest untapped deposits of gas left in the country. In the last five years, the price of natural gas has risen from about $2 per thousand cubic feet to nearly $7.
“The West has been a resource colony for the rest of the country for a long time,” said the Wilderness Society’s Eaton.
The conflict between energy companies and Western landowners and environmental groups will likely continue, said Michael Farina, associate director of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a Massachusetts-based energy think tank.
“If you can’t solve your land- access issues with $7 gas, you’re not going to solve it,” Farina said.
Staff writer Theo Stein can be reached at 303-820-1657 or tstein@denverpost.com.
