CRAIG, Colo.—Banning energy development in northwest Colorado’s Vermillion Basin, as recommended by Gov. Bill Ritter, could cost Moffat County its share of the area’s $5.85 billion natural gas reserve, county commissioners said.
The commissioners lambasted Ritter for landing on a mountain overlooking the basin on a recent helicopter tour and declaring that the area shouldn’t be drilled as the Bureau of Land Management has proposed.
The commissioners said in a letter Tuesday to Ritter that banning drilling in the basin would cost the county $5.7 million in tax revenue.
Ritter and Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., took an aerial tour July 3 of some of western Colorado’s energy hot spots. The Ritter administration also said in comments on the BLM’s plan for the area that drilling shouldn’t occur in the Vermillion Basin.
The commissioners said they resented Ritter’s “flying from the Front Range, standing on one of our community’s mountains, and attempting to recreate a vision that we have put our sweat and blood into over the last several years.”
The vision the county referred to was input from the community into the BLM’s draft management plan for its Little Snake resource area, including the Vermillion Basin, 81,000 acres of badlands.
The preliminary plan, released in February, contains four alternatives. The one backed by the BLM would allow about 3,000 gas wells over 1.3 million acres of public land the next 20 years. The agency says it would close about 8.5 percent of the land to oil and gas drilling, up from about 4 percent now.
The BLM has proposed limiting drilling in the basin to just 1 percent of the land at any one time.
But environmentalists note that the agency said in 2000 that 77,000 acres in the basin contained “wilderness character.” A group of area residents called Friends of Northwest Colorado proposed an alternate plan that prohibits drilling in Vermillion Basin.
“The Moffat County commissioners’ inflammatory rhetoric and criticism of the governor for visiting their county does a great disservice to the ongoing public discussion over how the spectacular public lands of northwest Colorado should be managed,” said Suzanne Jones, director of The Wilderness Society’s regional office in Denver.
The Wilderness Society and the Ritter administration questioned Moffat County’s estimated value of gas in Vermillion Basin.
Evan Dreyer, Ritter’s spokesman, said the staff is trying to determine how the commissioners arrived at their figures, which he called questionable.
Harris Sherman, director of the state Department of Natural Resources, said the basin contains about 2 percent of the area’s “high potential” oil and gas reserves and that barring drilling there wouldn’t affect gas production to “any measurable degree.”
The Wilderness Society said based on U.S. Geological Survey data, the natural gas under Vermillion Basin accounts for less than 5 percent of the gas that can be recovered in the area.
The BLM estimates there are 9.9 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas in the planning area: 1.3 million acres of surface and 1.9 million acres of subsurface minerals.
BLM spokesman David Boyd said the agency doesn’t have an estimate of the amount or value of the natural gas under the Vermillion Basin.
