Colorado and its wilderness are at a crossroads and unless action is taken immediately much of the state’s beauty may be lost forever, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette said Wednesday in announcing that the Colorado Wilderness Act of 2007 will be introduced in Congress next week.
Under the bill, further exploration and drilling on top of Colorado’s Roan Plateau, its cliffs and some of the plateau’s valleys would be prohibited, DeGette’s office said Wednesday. But rigs and pads already in place would not be affected.
“In the last seven years our public lands have faced an onslaught like never before from the Bush administration, particularly on the lands we are talking about in my bill, which are mostly Bureau of Land Management lands,” DeGette said at a news conference at Denver’s Confluence Park.
She said more than 85,000 acres of wilderness and other “public quality lands” have been leased for oil and gas drilling in Colorado and “more are being offered up for leasing every day.
“Drilling rigs, new roads, pipelines, more well pads, more noise and more dust have tarnished our landscapes, impacted our communities and disrupted our wildlife,” DeGette said.
But oil and gas industry reaction was swift and negative to the proposed bill.
Marc Smith, executive director of the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States, said that bill, if passed, will “continue to make us more dependent on foreign supplies of energy at a time when we can least afford that dependency.”
“The bill would prohibit exploration on those areas of the Naval oil shale reserves that were expressly transferred for oil and gas development,” Smith said. “The Roan Plateau contains an abundant supply of natural gas. It would provide enough energy for all of Colorado for 20 years, for four million homes for 20 years.”
Smith added that he thought that DeGette has mischaracterized the scale of development in Colorado and throughout the West. Oil and gas development occupies less than one percent of public lands throughout the West and the impact is both small and temporary, he said.
Meg Collins, president of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, said that COGA supports access to areas that appear to be promising for energy development.
“We continue to support access to Roan because we think the industry has proven itself capable of developing and exploring energy sources in an environmentally sensitive and responsible manner,” Collins said.
DeGette charged, however, that current development is being done “without regard to special qualities of wilderness…
“I frankly cannot stand by as a fourth-generation Coloradan and let every acre of our state be sold to the highest bidder. It is unconscionable and we have to protect the few remaining wild areas,” DeGette said.
If passed, DeGette’s bill would protect 62 separate areas across Colorado making up nearly 1.65 million acres of public lands and wilderness.
More than 800,000 acres of the land earmarked by DeGette is already managed as wilderness by the BLM.
DeGette said that she believes the bill can pass, despite unsuccessful efforts to get similar bills passed in previous years.
She said the reason she is optimistic is because of the new Democratic-led Congress and because the new chairman of the Resources Committee, U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) is a strong conservationist.
DeGette said Rahall is very interested in the bill and will start hearings on it, hopefully this year.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
