The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is poised to issue leases on 67,000 acres of the Roan Plateau on Aug. 14. But there is still a host of unanswered questions about how the estimated 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the plateau will be developed.
Worse, Congress adjourned Friday without resolving a legal snag that could rob Colorado of hundreds of millions of dollars of lease and royalty revenues from the Roan.
The BLM will almost certainly ignore 17,000 protests — including one by Gov. Bill Ritter — filed against the proposed sales and award the leases under a deal worked out over a seven-year period in cooperation with the administration of former Republican Gov. Bill Owens.
That means the federal land managers will ignore Ritter’s more environmentally sensitive proposal.
While The Post repeatedly editorialized in favor of the Ritter plan, the BLM proposal, largely crafted by Russ George, who was head of the state Department of Natural Resources under Owens and who now serves Ritter as head of the Department of Transportation, is workable.
Among other restrictions, the George/BLM plan would limit drilling operations to no more than 1 percent of the plateau’s surface land at any given time. All land disturbed by such operations would have to be eventually reclaimed and restored.
The BLM is obviously pushing as hard as it can to wrap up the leasing process while President Bush is still in office. When it originally unveiled its plan last summer, the BLM offered Ritter a mere 24 days to comment. Then Sen. Ken Salazar put a hold on the nomination of James Caswell as BLM director until the Interior Department agreed to grant Ritter the 120 days the new governor had requested to review the plan.
Ritter’s victory proved to be Pyrrhic, since the BLM quickly rejected his ideas and reverted to its original plan. In response, Salazar tried to write Ritter’s plan into federal law, but Congress on Friday recessed until Sept. 8 without passing Salazar’s proposal. Thus, the BLM is now free to issue the leases on its own terms.
There is still, however, a federal lawsuit filed by environmental groups seeking to require the BLM to provide more protection for wildlife. While a ruling in that case can’t come in time to stop the lease sales, it is still possible that broader safeguards for wildlife could ultimately be imposed.
Finally, it is critical that when Congress returns, it swiftly amends a 1997 Transfer Act prohibition on distributing lease bonuses or royalty revenues to Colorado prior to clean-up of the Anvil Points Oil Shale Superfund site.
Failure to amend that law could deny Colorado the 50 percent share of leasing bonuses and royalties from the Roan. While such royalties are normally split evenly between the states and federal governments, the Bush administration already has seized 52 percent of all new oil and gas leasing revenues instead of the traditional 5 0/50 split with states. Failure to resolve the Anvil Points issue could cost Colorado the balance of our energy dowry. Then, both our land and our bank accounts would suffer as the Roan’s resources are developed.
