DENVER—Federal officials want more time to submit briefs in a lawsuit over drilling on Colorado’s Roan Plateau to give the new administration a chance to review the case and explore the basis for a settlement.
Federal officials said in a brief filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Denver that extending the deadlines would give Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, confirmed in January, time to review the issues and “his stated intention” to explore an out-of-court settlement.
Environmental groups are suing the federal government to block drilling on top of the Roan Plateau in western Colorado. As a Colorado senator, Salazar urged the Bureau of Land Management to adopt Gov. Bill Ritter’s proposal to issue oil and gas leases on federal land in phases over several years rather than all at once.
The BLM auctioned off all the available parcels for a total of $114 million last summer. It was the agency’s highest-grossing sale of onshore leases in the lower 48 states.
The sale followed years of disputes over energy development on the Roan Plateau, prized for its oil and gas as well as wildlife and pristine backcountry. The area 180 miles west of Denver provides habitat for some of the country’s largest deer and elk herds and contains several trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
The environmental groups challenging the federal management plan for the Roan Plateau claim the BLM didn’t analyze the long-term environmental impacts of the drilling plans or consider a reasonable range of alternatives for developing natural gas on the plateau.
In 2007, Salazar, then a Democratic senator from Colorado, blocked the confirmation of President George Bush’s nominee to head the BLM until Colorado officials got more time to review the Roan Plateau plan.
The BLM’s 20-year management plan for the plateau projects 193 well pads and 1,570 wells on the public land over 20 years, including 13 pads and 210 wells on top.
Drilling on top would be done in stages and clusters to limit disturbance to 1 percent of the federal land at any time. Development would be focused on slopes with less than a 20 percent angle.
