October 30, 2009
Plan to Drill on Colorado Plateau Meets Resistance
By SEAN PATRICK FARRELL
RIFLE, Colo. " Standing in a canyon in hilly terrain, Ken Neubecker cast his fly into a cold stream. Minutes later he had a bite. Thrashing at the end of his line was a speckled green fish, a scarce Colorado cutthroat trout.
Mr. Neubecker was fishing on the Roan Plateau, a high stretch of terrain beloved by hunters, anglers and hikers for its clear streams, herds of deer and elk, and rugged beauty.
“There just aren’t many places like this in the West,” Mr. Neubecker said. “It’s a real gem.”
Energy companies are looking at the Roan Plateau, too " through entirely different eyes. Vast deposits of natural gas are believed to lie beneath the stretch on which Mr. Neubecker was fishing, and the companies want to drill.
“What is really special about the Roan Plateau, these lands in particular, is the incredible energy density beneath it,” said Duane Zavadil, vice president of the Bill Barrett Corporation, a Denver energy company that holds drilling rights to the Roan.
The company’s plans are at the center of a battle over the future of the plateau, one that could influence the fate of thousands of acres in the high country known as the intermountain West.
A last-minute leasing push by the Bush administration put extensive federal lands in Utah and Colorado into the hands of oil and gas companies, including 36,000 acres of the Roan Plateau. The Obama administration has inherited the touchy question of what to do with those leases.
As one of his first decisions, Ken Salazar, the Coloradan who is President Obama’s interior secretary, scrapped a series of disputed leases in Utah. Last week, he announced that he would seek an investigation into other leases that granted favorable terms and low royalty rates for experimental projects to extract oil from shale.
But so far, Mr. Salazar has decided against canceling leases on the Roan, saying that he must uphold the buyers’ rights.
Sporting and environmental groups are suing the government in federal court, demanding that the leases be thrown out, and a preliminary ruling is expected this fall.
Lands like those of the Roan Plateau are not the pristine sort of wilderness found in places like Yellowstone or in Rocky Mountain National Park. They are generally cut by roads and have been used as rangeland for cattle for decades.
“The Roan Plateau is a microcosm of the West that up until now would not have received attention,” said Chuck Davis, a professor of environmental politics at Colorado State University. He said groups from across the political spectrum " including city dwellers with second homes, hunters, hikers and ranchers " are increasingly questioning the need for oil and gas development in places like the Roan, concluding that “second or third echelon is still pretty special.”
As Mr. Neubecker acknowledged on his fishing trip, “This isn’t classic Colorado ‘majestic mountain peaks’ country.”
But as the number of truly wild places in the United States dwindles, people like Mr. Neubecker, who is president of the Colorado chapter of a conservation group called Trout Unlimited, are arguing that the nation ought to recalibrate its view of what is worth saving.
This desire to preserve more land is running up against a powerful economic incentive to develop new supplies of oil and gas. In particular, the nation is undergoing a boom in natural gas drilling. New production techniques have expanded the country’s potential reserves of gas by 40 percent in the last few years.
Expanded gas output offers environmental benefits. Burning natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than burning other fossil fuels, and many experts argue that substitution of gas for dirtier fuels should be a major strategy to reduce the nation’s contribution to global warming.
But some of the methods of getting at the gas " fragmentation, for instance, which breaks up the shale to get to gas pockets " can also pollute water supplies, critics say.
This week, one of the largest gas companies said it would not drill in upstate New York after encountering opposition from local residents.
As it lays plans to exploit the Roan Plateau, the Bill Barrett Corporation is promising sensitivity to the area’s wild character.
The company acquired its drilling rights last year after buying a 90 percent stake in the leases from Vantage Energy, which won them at a federal auction last August. (That auction netted nearly $114 million, a record for a lower-48 onshore lease.)
The company has told investors that if it is allowed to develop the plateau, it may drill as many as 3,200 wells. But Mr. Zavadil said the company would diligently avoid trout streams and minimize other disruptions by using advanced techniques to pack dozens of wells together.
The company has also pledged to develop only portions of the plateau at a time, and to put up money to improve wildlife habitats.
“We can have our cake and eat it, too,” Mr. Zavadil said. “The Roan Plateau will be preserved with oil and gas development. There will be a short while when there are wells being drilled and trucks driving by, but the benefits far outweigh those minimal costs.”
From atop the Roan’s cliffs, it is easy to see signs of encroaching oil and gas development. Service roads, well pads and gas rigs spread out across the valley floor. Such intensive energy development is remaking big parts of the landscape stretching the length of the Rocky Mountains.
Opponents fear that development on top of the Roan Plateau will despoil it, leading to air and water pollution and disruption of wildlife.
In the Bush administration’s leasing program, those potential impacts were not taken fully into consideration, contends Michael Freeman, a lawyer with Earthjustice, which filed the suit calling for the cancellation of the Roan leases.
Mediation in the case is scheduled for Nov. 6. The groups suing the government are asking a judge to revoke the leases. That would not necessarily put the Roan off limits to future development, but it might require a fresh assessment of the environmental risks.
For his part, Mr. Neubecker said he did not oppose drilling for natural gas, but was concerned that it happen in the right places. “I cook with natural gas, and I love the stuff,” he said. But on a tour of the plateau, he pointed out aspects of the landscape that in his view were worth preserving.
The rugged hills are dotted with sage and aspen groves. Some creeks are watering holes for cattle, but most appear untouched, rushing through the deep shale canyons that define the plateau’s topography. Vegetation hangs from some escarpments, and smooth shale slabs hold back pools of trout.
The cutthroat trout that Mr. Neubecker comes to fish from the Roan’s streams have been isolated since the last ice age by the steep canyons and waterfalls.
He asserted that a spill of drilling chemicals could “wipe out this population forever.” In fact, similar trout populations exist elsewhere in the West, but the Roan’s cutthroats are genetically pure, and preserving the fish is a major conservation goal in Colorado.
“There are some places where there are other values that have to considered, above and beyond the strict natural gas value,” Mr. Neubecker said. “And this is one of them.”
- walk in the park compared to other surgeries and hoping to go back to work towards the end of next week. Slowly, slowly... but getting there 
