ALBUQUERQUE — A federal judge has denied a conservation group’s effort to require the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to put more work into a plan for nearly 10,000 new gas wells in the San Juan Basin of northern New Mexico.
U.S. District Judge Judith C. Herrera, in a 39-page decision last week, said the BLM followed the National Environmental Policy Act and other federal laws in developing a 2003 management plan for drilling over 20 years in the 16,000-square-mile basin that straddles the border of New Mexico and Colorado.
Steve Henke, district manager for the BLM’s Farmington field office, said agency officials were pleased by the ruling.
The BLM has been working under the plan for five years, since there was no injunction on development while the lawsuit by the San Juan Citizens Alliance was pending. Henke said nearly 3,000 natural-gas wells have been drilled in the area since the plan’s approval, with about half the production coming from coal-bed methane near Fruitland.
The New Mexico portion of the San Juan Basin, under development for more than 50 years, encompasses one of the largest natural-gas fields in the nation.
The resource management plan authorizes nearly 27,000 acres of new surface disturbance on land under the Farmington office, increasing total acreage for oil and gas infrastructure to 110,400.
