CHEYENNE, Wyo.—An environmental group filed a lawsuit Tuesday to stop the construction of new well pads and roads in a southwest Wyoming oil and gas field, saying expanded drilling approved by federal regulators would leave the area “moonscaped.”
The Laramie-based Biodiversity Conservation Alliance filed the lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management in federal court in Casper.
The lawsuit targets the 30,000-acre Jonah field, an area in the Green River Basin packed with an estimated 13 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In 2006, the BLM approved a plan that would allow drilling some 3,100 wells in the field over about 75 years.
Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist with Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, said the plan allows companies to drill 64 to 128 wells per square mile.
“This is an unprecedented well density for Wyoming and elsewhere in the West,” Molvar said, noting most gas fields in Wyoming have only four wells per square mile.
He said the density of wells violates federal law prohibiting “unnecessary and undue degradation” of public land, leaving little habitat for wildlife such as sage grouse, pygmy rabbits and various songbirds that may be candidates for endangered species status.
“So this area will be moonscaped for a period of over seven decades, during which time the sensitive species that once called this area home will be excluded,” Molvar said.
BLM spokeswoman Cindy Wertz said the agency had not seen the lawsuit and declined immediate comment.
Molvar said the gas can be recovered by drilling new wells from the hundreds of existing well pads by using directional drilling, a process by which multiple holes are drilled at angles from a single well pad. He contended that all 3,100 new wells can be drilled from existing pads.
“In our lawsuit we are not seeking to stop all drilling in the Jonah field,” he said. “We are only seeking to halt the construction of new well pads and the construction of new roads so that the oil and gas companies could fully drill the entire project directionally from the existing well pad.”
Molvar singled out Canadian oil and gas company EnCana Corp., the company with the largest operations in Jonah, for causing the most habitat damage by declining to drill directional wells, which are more costly and complicated to drill than conventional straight-hole wells.
“And the only reason that we can see that they’re not doing it today is that they like to do it the cheap way instead of doing it the right way,” Molvar said.
EnCana spokesman Randy Teeuwen said the company does drill some directional wells but most of its wells are drilled vertically because it is actually more sensible both environmentally and geologically. The company drilled 160 new wells last year in Jonah, bringing the company’s total there to 880.
“The science demonstrates that the way we’re developing Jonah field is the least environmentally damaging,” Teeuwen said.
Directional wells take bigger rigs and more time to drill, causing more air pollution, he said, whereas single, vertical wells can be drilled with smaller, natural gas powered rigs.
In addition, EnCana is allowed to disturb only 14,030 acres at any given time.
“So we have a very aggressive reclamation program under way,” Teeuwen said.
He likened Jonah’s geology to a bowl of potato chips with levels of disorganized pockets of natural gas, separated vertically in some cases by hundreds of feet, and with some pockets overlapping each other and some not.
In most cases, the most efficient way to tap the layers of gas deposits is drilling straight down, Teeuwen said.
EnCana also has contributed $24.5 million toward various conservation projects to protect wildlife migration corridors, create sage grouse and raptor habitat, and improve water habitat around Jonah field, he said.
“There’s a variety of things we’re doing in order to enhance wildlife surrounding Jonah field on a two-to-one basis,” he said. “So for every acre we disturb we’re doing something positive on two acres adjacent to Jonah.”
