Happy Holidays, Gary
Thought this piece might interest you, if you haven't already seen it.\scott
Sunday, December 29, 2002 - 12:14 a.m. Pacific
Ranchers blast gas drilling as a raw deal
By Blaine Harden and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
GILLETTE, Wyo. — As it runs through Orin Edwards'
ranch, the Belle Fourche River bubbles like champagne.
The bubbles can burn. They are methane, also called
natural gas, the fuel that heats 59 million U.S. homes.
Edwards noticed the bubbles two years ago, after gas
wells were drilled on his land. The company that drilled the
wells denies responsibility for the flammable river.
An hour's drive west, the artesian well on Roland and Beverly Landrey's ranch has failed. After
producing 50 gallons a minute for 34 years, the well, the ranch's only source of water, stopped
flowing in September. A well digger who examined it blames energy companies drilling for gas
nearby, but the companies dispute that. So the couple — he is 83 and ailing; she describes herself
as "no spring chicken" — haul water in gallon jugs and drive 30 miles to town weekly to wash
clothes and bathe.
The breaking point
Dave Bullach, a welder who lives near Gillette, could not take it anymore. For two sleep-deprived
years, he endured the incessant yowl of a methane compressor, a giant pump that squeezes
methane into an underground pipeline. There are thousands of these screaming machines in
Wyoming, where neither state nor federal law regulates their noise. Bullach stormed out of his house
at midnight last year with a rifle and shot at the compressor until a sheriff's deputy hauled him off to
jail.
This is the cantankerous world of energy extraction in the Rocky Mountain West, where natural gas
is abundant and cheap to remove, and where the Bush administration, in its aggressive push to
increase domestic energy production, is on the brink of approving the largest-ever gas-drilling project
on federal land. In Wyoming's Powder River Basin, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) says it
will give final approval early next year to the drilling of 39,000 wells on 8 million acres.
With natural-gas consumption expected to soar in the next two decades, no one questions the
need for new sources of this clean-burning fossil fuel. What alarms ranchers, along with
environmental groups, is the hugely disruptive process of extracting gas from all those wells.
Ranchers lost mineral rights
It is a 15-year-old drilling technique called coal-bed methane extraction, which can turn ranches and
prairies into sprawling industrial zones, laced with wells, access roads, power lines, compressor
stations and wastewater pits.
Stoking local outrage, the split nature of land ownership in much of the West, with mineral rights
owned separately from surface rights, allows energy companies to operate on ranchers' land without
their consent. Environmentalists also doubt whether energy companies actually can remove — in a
way that is profitable and ecologically sound — the enormous amounts of methane that federal
experts say is available in Western coal seams.
"Ranchers have never truly thought much of tree-hugging environmentalists," said John Dewey, 76,
who owns a small cattle ranch outside Sheridan, Wyo. "But with these methane boys on our land,
we are starting to see these environmentalists as conservationists who want to help us preserve
land for our kids."
Most natural gas in the Rocky Mountain West lies fairly close to the surface, in coal seams, trapped
under huge aquifers. To reach the gas, water is pumped out, peppering the landscape with large
numbers of relatively cheap and shallow wells.
Biggest loss: water
Oddly, in an arid region prone to persistent drought, the primary waste product — and
environmental threat — of extracting coal-bed methane is water, in phenomenal amounts. In the
Powder River Basin, for example, drillers are expected to pump out 3.2 million acre-feet of water —
as much as New York uses in 2* years.
This immense draining of aquifers by thousands of wells is what primarily makes drilling for coal-bed
methane so environmentally intrusive. Conventional gas wells usually are much deeper and more
expensive to dig, and do not drain huge quantities of groundwater.
This water, of course, can be a godsend to ranchers — if it is not too salty and shows up in a
convenient place and in usable amounts. But if the water is contaminated with salts, as much of it is
in Wyoming and across the West, it can turn pasture barren.
In addition, coal-bed methane wells often produce far more water than a rancher conceivably can
use. Besides causing damaging erosion, too much water can sharply lower water tables, sometimes
for decades, while drying up nearby wells and ruining natural springs used by wildlife.
These consequences can make ranchers loathe companies that extract methane.
"On one side, the producers feel very strongly they are helping to preserve the American way of
life," said Mickey Steward, director of the Coal Bed Methane Coordination Coalition, a Wyoming
group that tries, and often fails, to make peace between agitated ranchers and impatient producers.
"On the other side, drilling is changing the lives of ranchers who are just not used to having
anybody affect where they live except for themselves."
Compounding the anger is the fractured ownership of land in much of the Rocky Mountain West. Far
more than in other parts of the country with oil and gas reserves, landowners do not own the wealth
under them. Farmers and ranchers settled more than 30 million acres of the West under the Stock
Raising Homestead Act of 1916. The act's rules, in almost all cases, granted mineral rights to the
federal government.
"Ways of life are being changed for the purpose of energy extraction," said Jim Ventrello, a
Republican county commissioner in Delta County, Colo., "and it is not the quality of life that we seek
here."
The eagerness of energy companies and the Bush administration to produce more coal-bed
methane can be explained by these numbers: The United States consumes about 23 trillion cubic
feet of natural gas a year, nearly all domestically produced. By 2020, demand is expected to jump
by about one-third, according to government projections. The energy companies and the White
House see coal-bed methane from the interior West, the country's second-largest gas resource, as a
vital part of the short-term solution.
The cost difference between conventional and coal-bed methane drilling is extraordinary. A
conventional well on land usually costs several million dollars. An offshore well costs tens of millions.
A coal-bed methane well can be dug for about $90,000.
In the San Juan Basin of New Mexico, where ranch land is as rugged as any in the West, gas wells
outnumber cattle 2 to 1. The basin for 15 years has been the pioneer in the coal-bed methane
process.
Piñon and juniper woodlands are interwoven with thousands of miles of roads and pipelines. With
20,000 gas wells in production and at least 10,000 more planned, a swath of federal land the size
of Connecticut accounts for 80 percent of the coal-bed methane produced in the United States.
Increasingly, however, the state's pride in coal-bed methane, which is a major source of tax
revenue, is mixed with misgivings. Ranchers such as Tweeti Blancett, a sixth-generation New
Mexican, warn that a fragile balance between production and conservation is falling badly out of
whack.
"We are a multiple-use land, and we understand that," Blancett said. "But we want industry to
understand that there are other users out there."
The federal regulatory gates are set to open in the Powder River Basin early next year. When they
do, there is almost certainly going to be a rush by ranchers to hire lawyers and file lawsuits.
Drilling began about five years ago on state and private land in the basin. More than 15,000 wells
are in the ground. While many have been well-managed, some have triggered uncontrolled water
runoff, flooded pastures, eroded land and pumped large amounts of salty water into streams and
creeks.
Some damage goes unfixed
Local environmental groups and many ranchers note that federal and state laws do not require
energy companies to repair all drilling damage.
Then there is the question of water. Little of the 3.2 million acre-feet of water pumped out in the
Powder River Basin will be pumped back into the ground. One prominent energy executive in
Wyoming says that coal-bed methane drilling cannot be considered environmentally sound.
"Looking after the Earth is a pay-as-you-go process, but they don't have a plan like that here," said
Raymond Plank, chairman of the board of Apache, one of the largest independent natural-gas and
oil companies in the United States. It does not operate coal-bed wells in Wyoming.
"What happened here is ready, fire, aim," Plank said.
Plank, it should be noted, has a Wyoming rancher's bias. A 20,000-acre ranch he has owned for
decades and recently donated to a nonprofit foundation has been scarred by coal-bed methane
drilling. |
