A plan to issue gas-exploration leases in new territory of Grand County next month has drawn fire from local officials and highlights a growing backlash against expansion of the industry in the West.
The federal Bureau of Land Management lease auction scheduled for Nov. 8 includes 23 parcels in the fast- growing tourism-and-ranching region where practically no exploration has occurred in the past.
Among the available leases are 12,802 acres of BLM land and 18,276 acres of “split estate” property – in which the landowner does not control the mineral rights beneath the ground – including parcels just outside Hot Sulphur Springs.
“I’m not sure that it’s a good fit,” said Granby Mayor Ted Wang, who was drafting a protest letter authorized last week by the Town Council. “To have something like that potentially plopped right here is not in conjunction with what we’re trying to do.”
As the Bush administration continues its push to develop domestic energy supplies by encouraging oil-and- gas exploration on public lands throughout the West, communities and activists wary of the social and environmental impacts increasingly are resisting intrusions into new areas.
A sale of 10 leases in Conejos County scheduled in August was postponed after local officials pleaded for more time to evaluate the impacts of drilling in an area where no permits had been issued in 15 years.
And this month, the BLM canceled a lease sale in Utah for the first time in at least 25 years after the Denver-based Center for Native Ecosystems claimed the agency hadn’t performed adequate environmental studies. Part of a statewide auction of 172 leases covering 186,952 acres, the Grand County sale similarly has raised environmental issues.
The state Division of Wildlife recently expressed concerns over impacts such as energy exploration on wildlife – including elk, mule deer, pronghorn and the imperiled greater sage grouse – and called for seasonal and geographic restrictions on drilling.
“The Colorado Division of Wildlife has several concerns to the impact on wildlife and habitat within and surrounding the proposed lease area,” Ron Velarde, the agency’s northwest regional manager, wrote in formal comments to the BLM. “Fragmentation of the habitat will have a negative impact to many wildlife species.”
Greater sage grouse, which are eligible for the federal endangered-species list, are particularly disturbed by energy exploration, said Steve Holmer, spokesman for the American Bird Conservancy in Washington, D.C.
He pointed to recent research in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming that found that sage-grouse breeding areas declined by 82 percent during development of coal-bed methane fields.
BLM officials, however, say they are obligated by federal law to issue the 10-year exploration leases, for which bidding starts at $2 an acre, and new agency director Jim Caswell recently said that he expects the current pace of drilling to continue.
The BLM manages 258 million acres, or about one-eighth of the land in the United States, and it controls mineral rights on about 700 million acres, mostly in the West.
Oil-and-gas leases available in quarterly auctions may be proposed by anyone – so long as they are in areas previously deemed appropriate for exploration – although the source of a nomination is not disclosed until after the sale is completed to protect proprietary information held by would-be drillers.
Grand County is not believed to harbor a significant profitable quantity of natural gas, a big reason that only a single drilling permit has been issued there since 1988 and nothing has been produced, according to Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission records.
Still, the BLM already has issued eight leases covering 15,827 acres in the county, said spokeswoman Jaime Gardner.
Local officials are particularly concerned with the effects on water quality as well as visual impacts and negative repercussions to hunting and fishing.
U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., has called on the agency to postpone the lease sale to give local officials and residents time to consider the potential impacts.
“Given the potential conflicts in this area … BLM needs to pull back,” he said in a written response to a Denver Post inquiry.
Steve Lipsher: 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com
