WALDEN — This energy exploration thing just got a lot closer to home.
The area of acute concern no longer is confined to some remote canyon country far to the west where most people who read this seldom go. The latest place to face the blowtorch is North Park, an outdoor playground to many thousands from Colorado’s Front Range. From Fort Collins to metro Denver, hunters and fishers flock to a high mountain valley laced with rivers and lakes and framed by some of the state’s most valued deer and elk terrain.
It also overlays a shale formation where reposes an oil deposit estimated variously at 10 million to 80 million barrels. This isn’t exactly Saudi Arabia, but at a time of pump price panic, it’s enough to bring energy companies running, eager to turn the valley floor — and perhaps the near mountainsides — into a veritable pincushion.
Some 125,000 acres, public and private, have been leased by a Texas firm. Only a moratorium requested by the Colorado Division of Wildlife on certain sensitive lands west of Colorado Highway 125 has kept the total from spiraling.
The overall potential for disruption of fish and wildlife values has caused a key conservation group, Sportsmen for Responsible Energy Development, to peg North Park as one of 10 areas of greatest concern in the Rocky Mountain West.
“We’re not saying they shouldn’t drill, but do so responsibly,” said Bill Dvorak of the National Wildlife Federation, one of more than 200 member organizations of the sportsmen’s coalition.
At issue in North Park is how mass drilling might affect water quality in the several headwater streams of the North Platte River, a 680-mile waterway that sustains agriculture and recreation in three states. Also at risk is a migration route for a mule deer herd shared with Wyoming, along with Colorado’s most thriving population of sage grouse.
Houston-based EOG Resources Inc. has drilled a handful of wells on private property, with a whispered production rate that would make them among the richest in the region. Natural gas also is present, another potential source of production. Seismograph crews from a Midland, Texas-based company currently are scouting the valley to determine the best places to drill.
All of this places Walden, a sleepy town of fewer than 500 people in a county with less than 1,200, squarely in the path of a hurricane-force energy boom. Wildlife advocates worry about a scenario similar to that in the Pinedale, Wyo., Anticline, where half of the mule deer and 90 percent of the sage grouse have been displaced.
“My fear is we don’t do a comprehensive environmental impact statement to get a good baseline of wildlife values so they can be considered in this process,” said Dwayne Meadows of the Theodore Roosevelt Partnership, another signator for the sportsmen’s group.
To that end, local BLM officials agreed to suspend leasing in an area that includes Lake John and the North Platte River while it gathers data to contribute to a hoped-for plan that would take wildlife values into account. Against this backdrop, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission late last month gave preliminary approval to a series of statewide rules to establish drilling guidelines.
Included is a provision giving the state authority to identify restricted surface areas, sensitive habitat zones, on both public and private land. But the commission refused to consider a rule that would forbid drilling in key areas when deer and elk are giving birth. It promises to form action groups to recommend further aquatic and riparian production, along with rules for reclaiming disturbed land.
A major disappointment is that these rules won’t apply on federal lands until next April; RSA limitations won’t be effective until 2010, ample leeway for all sorts of intervening mischief.
Where all this is headed is anyone’s guess. But, for sure, it’s getting closer.
Charlie Meyers: 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com
