Will Drilling Spell the End of a Quintessential American Landscape? — Erik Molvar

7/28/2019 Will Drilling Spell the End of a Quintessential American Landscape? Erik Molvar

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WILL DRILLING

SPELL THE

END OF A

QUINTESSEN-

TIAL AMERICAN

LANDSCAPE?

ERIK MOLVAR


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This publicat ion is an excerpted chapter from The Energy Reader: Overdevelopment and

the Delusion of Endless Growth, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner,

eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2012). The Energy Readeris copyright

2012 by the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and published in collaboration with

Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute.

For other excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visit energy-reality.org or

contact Post Carbon Institute.

Photo: George Wuerthner

about the author

ERIK MOLVARis a wildl ife biologist and executive director of Biodiversity Conservation Alliance in Laramie,

Wyoming. He is the author of numerous guidebooks including Wild Wyoming, Hiking Glacier and Waterton Lakes

National Parks,Alaska on Foot: Wilderness Techniques for the Far North, and Wyomings Red Desert: A Photographic Journey.

Post Carbon Inst itute | 613 4th Str eet, Suite 208 | Sa nta Rosa, California 95404 USA


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1

From the windswept plains of Montana to the des-erts along the southern border of New Mexico,a battle is raging between the fossil fuel boosters and

westerners fighting for their sense of place. At stake is

the very soul of the American West. The wide-open

spaces, the spectacular landscapes, the sense of remote-

ness are all being eroded by the bulldozers and dril ling

rigs sweeping across the region. And the oil and gas

industry, once viewed with patriotic fervor, has become

the object of concern and distrust across the West. Oil

and gas development poses serious threats to air and

water quality, can destroy wildli fe habitat, and gener-

ally degrades the health of the land.

An assault on open space

The natural resource perhaps most important to the

character of the West, yet given least weight in land-use

planning, is the regions wide-open spaces. For many

years, a prevailing frontier mental ity has clung to the

myth that open spaces are inexhaustible, that because

spectacular landscapes shaped by nature have been

abundant here since time immemorial they will never

disappear. But as public lands and private ranches have

been converted to industria l landscapes by oil, gas, and

coalbed methane drilling, in increments ranging from

thousands to millions of acres, westerners have been

confronted by the reality that, while open space may

be considered a birthright, it is not limitless.

Public backlash against drilling has grown especially

fierce in cases where oil and gas development has invaded

special landscapes having elevated value for westerners.

In Montana, for example, proposals to drill explor-

atory wells in the mountains of the Rocky Mountain

Front prompted decades-long efforts to close the area to

industrial incursions. In Wyoming, threats of dril ling in

high-value landscapes in the Red Desert, such as Adobe

Town and the Jack Morrow Hills, caused the largest

outpourings of public opposition to development in

the states history, while a proposal to site exploratory

wells near Little Mountain, one of Wyomings premier

elk hunting destinations, galvanized the local hunting

community to fight the project. In Colorado, the pros-

pect of drilling rigs moving into proposed wilderness

atop the Roan Plateau sparked a major controversy, and

in southern New Mexico concerns about protecting an

important underground aquifer spurred then governor

Bill Richardson to file a lawsuit to protect Otero Mesa.

All of these examples have this in common: Human

residents of the affected states saw outstanding benefits

in these landscapes that trumped the value of any oil

and gas that might lie beneath them.

The sacrifice of some of Americas last wild and nat-

ural landscapes comes with long-term costs to west-

ern economies. The tax rolls swell during oil and gas

booms, but during the busts that inevitably follow,

tourism and other industries dependent on open spaces

The natural resource perhaps most important to

the character of the West is the regions wide-open

spaces, but that sense of remoteness is being eroded

by the bulldozers and drilling rigs sweeping across

the region. Oil and gas development poses serious

threats to air and water quality, fragments wildlife

habitat, and generally degrades the health of the land.


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Molvar Will Drilling Spell the End

2

serve as the sustainable economic engines that keep

western economies afloat. In Wyoming, tourism is the

second-largest economic sector, with hunting, fishing,

and wildlife watching on public lands contributing

more than $100 million to the Wyoming economy.

Protecting open space from the depredations of drill-ing makes sense: A study examining the economies

of rural communities throughout the West found that

communities with a larger percentage of public lands in

protected status ( such as national parks, wi lderness, and

roadless areas) had greater population growth, more job

creation, and higher growth rates for personal income;

unprotected federal lands showed no such positive eco-

nomic correlation. And while oil corporations based

in Texas and Oklahoma contribute significantly to the

local tax base during the boom years, most of the min-

eral wealth they generate leaves the region without trig-

gering any economic multipliers there.

The destruction of the Westswildlife h eritage

While sagebrush ecosystems in the Great Basin states

of Oregon, Nevada, Utah, and Idaho have been badly

impaired by the invasion of cheatgrass, a noxious weed,

the sagebrush ecosystems of Wyoming and north-

western Colorado remain relatively intact. This vast

sagebrush steppe is among the healthiest natural eco-

systems remaining on the North American continent.

Unfortunately, lying beneath the remote sagebrush

basins and sur rounding mountain ranges of the Rocky

Mountain states are lucrative deposits of natural gas

and coalbed methane, along with a marginal amount

of oil. The collision of big oil and the nations finest

wildlife resources and open spaces threatens some of

Americas wildest remaining country, and has ignited

a controversy pitting westerners of all types against

oil executives.

The impacts of drilling activity on wildlife have been

well documented, including the direct elimination of

habitat as thousands of acres fall beneath the bulldozer

blade, increased poaching as temporary workers from

out of state flood the gas patch, and a rise in wildlife

deaths due to vehicle collisions resulting from surging

truck traffic. Noise from drilling rigs and compressor

stations can disturb wildlife enough to cause temporary

or long-term abandonment of otherwise suitable habi-

tats by some species.

But the biggest impact on wildlife of the oil industrysincursion into the intermountain West is habitat frag-

mentation. Imagine a vast and untouched swath of sage-

brush covering hundreds of square miles. Then build a

road or establish an oil or gas well pad right through the

middle of it, either of which will be avoided by wildl ife.

The habitat has just been carved into two large frag-

ments. Continue to divide these fragments into smaller

and smaller parcels until there is a road or a well pad

every quarter mile. Now you have the equivalent of

full-field development for natural gas. The remaining

tatters of natural landscape are often too small to provide

sufficient habitat for many types of wildlife. When this

occurs, species sensitive to habitat fragmentation and

disturbance by human activityranging from the

pygmy rabbit to the ferruginous hawk to elkare the

first to disappear.

The oil industry is fond of claiming that even a fully

developed well field disturbs less than 5 percent of

the landscape, leaving the vast majority as untouched

habitat. But the fact of the matter is that while only a

small proportion of this land may fall directly under

the bulldozers blade, the impacts of production activ-

ity radiate outward from roads and well pads to the

greater surrounding area, driving away sensitive wild-

life. Populations of sagebrush songbirds decrease within

300 feet (91 meters) of well-field roads. Elk avoid lands

within a half mile of well-field roads in sagebrush coun-

try. Sage grouse are even more sensitive: Drilling rigs

sited within three miles of sage grouse breeding sites

(called leks) caused declines in breeding birds in a

western Wyoming study, and even after drilling was

finished, a producing well sited within two miles of

a sage grouse lek caused populations to drop signifi-

cantly. The dust thrown up on gravel roads by regular

truck traffic can choke off vegetation: For one coal-

bed methane project in the eastern Red Desert, the

Bureau of Land Management predicted that the amount

of usable forage for livestock and wildli fe could drop by


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3

almost a third as a result of dust. As a result, the typical

oil or natural gas field with four wells per square mile

might have only 3 percent of its land area occupied by

roads, well pads, and pipelines, butfrom a wildlife

perspectiveit becomes an industrial landscape with

fragmented habitats vacant of sensitive native wildli fe.

Despite industry claims that wildlife can happily coex-

ist with drilling rigs in the gas patch, in reality some

species dwindle as the drilling rigs move in. Coalbed

methane development in the Powder River Basin

caused sage grouse populations to decline by 82 percent

(in contrast, sage grouse in undeveloped areas dropped

by only 12 percent), while population modeling in

western Wyoming showed that major declines in the

Pinedale Anticline and Jonah Field would lead to the

total loss of sage grouse there within nineteen years.

Another study showed that mule deer populations win-

tering in the Pinedale Anticline drilling area dropped

by 43 percent in conjunction with gas development,

while nearby herds on ranges free from drilling did not

exhibit similar declines.1In addition, oil and gas fields

can be an obstacle to big game migration. There is evi-

dence that elk migrations subjected to oil development

in the LaBarge Field at the base of the Wyoming Range

have been blocked from accessing winter ranges north

of LaBarge Creek by the development of an oil field at

the base of the foothills.2

Solutions are available butprogress rem ains elusive

Every drop of oil and every cubic foot of gas extracted

was carbon already sequestered underground, which

oil corporations are pull ing out for the express purpose

of burning, with the carbon going straight into the

atmosphere. Natura l gas production comes with added

problems: Methane, which makes up over 85 percent

of natural gas, is a far more potent greenhouse gas than

carbon dioxide, and mass ive amounts of it leak out at

well sites, compressor stations, and along pipelines. In

addition, production of coalbed methane from near-

surface coal deposits can result in methane seeps at the

surface that vent thousands of cubic feet per minute

into the air.3Once the water is removed from the coal

seam to release the coalbed methane, ideally the gas is

captured by production wells and put into pipelines for

salebut significant quantities can escape to the sur face

through fractures in the bedrock or at locations where

the coal seam crops out at the surface.4Thus, from a

global climate change perspective, the ultimate solutionmight be to s imply wean our economy off its addiction

to fossil fuels.

However, given the time it could take for renewable

sources of energy to replace oil and gas, it is unlikely

that drilling for oil and gas will stop completely in

the next several decades. Even assuming that full-field

development of major oil and gas deposits will con-

tinue, such development could become compatible with

protecting wildlife and treasured landscapes if strong

reforms of dril ling management are imposed on the oil

industry. The first and most obvious change would be

to recognize that the highest value inherent in at least

some of our public lands is their wildlife, recreational,

or scenic attributes, not drilling potential; these lands

should be removed from industrial development.

The second major change would be to require that ful l-

field drilling operations be designed to maximize the

ability for wildlife and native ecosystems to survive

alongside drilling by minimizing the physical foot-

print and other impacts on the lands, wildlife, clean

air, and water resources. In some parts of the world,

directional drilling is used to tap oil and gas deposits

that are as far away as seven horizontal miles from the

well site. Additionally, this method allows for cluster-

ing more than 50 individual gas wells at a single pad

and drilling outward to tap surrounding lands, instead

of building a road, pad, and pipeline for each individual

well. Directional dri lling also makes it possible to drill

diagonal ly underneath sensitive wildlife habitats, leav-

ing the surface of the land undisturbed. These methods

cost a little more than the heavy-footprint methods of

designing well fields that are typical today, but if every

company were held to the same high standard, it might

inspire the industry to apply some American ingenuity

so that very little oil or gas would be unavailable for

production in the end.


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4

Final ly, there is no reason why all federal lands should

be open to drill ing at any one time. It might be wiser to

try phased development, in which a fraction of land

is open for drilling at a given time and later, after the

industry has left and the land has been reclaimed, a new

area could be opened up. Wildlife populations wouldalways have at least some habitat in which to survive,

and regional economies would be supported by a steady

pace of industrial development instead of todays dev-

astating cycle of boom and busta cycle that stretches

communities to the breaking point as oil-field workers

flood in, and then leaves them high and dry with no

economic base to support the expanded infrastructure

that was built to support the boom in the first place.

Although far from being a perfect system, on U.S. Forest

Service lands, federal foresters decide which lands wil l

be offered up for logging, design the size and layout of

different cut units, and even determine which trees will

be cut and which must be left standing. In contrast, oil

and gas development on public lands has been man-

agedfrom cradle to gravealmost exclusively by the

fossil fuels industry itself. The public lands offered for

lease at oil and gas auctions are identified by industry,

not by land managers. Once they own the leases, the

industry decides where and when to drill exploratory

wells and conduct seismic testing. When it comes time

to design where and how many wells to drill in an

oil or gas field, it is the corporation that designs every

aspect of the well field; federal officials can influence

the design, but typically the alternative backed by the

proposing corporation is accepted, with few or no mod-

ifications. Nothing in the law, however, prevents fed-

eral officials in the Bureau of Land Management and

other agencies from taking the reins to manage oil and

gas drilling in a way that makes it ecologically sustain-

able. Its high time they did.

For years, the oil industry has been able to pursue max-

imum profits at the expense of respect for the land.

That they would is no surprise: Private corporations are

accountable to their shareholders, and quarterly profit

margins are the principal measure of success. But across

the American West, more than half of the land and

an even greater fraction of the oil and gas deposits are

under federal ownership, which means that they belong

to the American people. And these lands are supposed to

be managed for multiple purposes, including wildlife,

clean water, wilderness, and public recreation. There is

no particular reason that oil and gas drilling should be

the dominant use of the land as it is today, with otheruses surviving as best they can in the context of drilling

every profitable deposit of oil or gas. Why shouldnt the

needs and priorities of the public come before private

profits when it comes to our public lands?


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endnotes

1 H. Sawyer, R. Nielson, D. Strickland, and

L. MacDonald. 2005 Annual Report.

Sublette Mule Deer Study (Phase II): Long-term

monitoring plan to assess the potential impacts

of energy development on mule deer in thePinedale Anticline Project Area, (Cheyenne, WY:

WEST, Inc., 2005) http://www.west-inc.com/

reports/PAPA_2005_report_med.pdf.

2 F.W. Lindzey, Piney Front Elk Study,

presentation to the Governors (Wyoming)

Planning Office, 2005.

3 Walter Merschat, declaration in exhibit to

Biodiversity Conservation All iance v. Bennett,IBLA 2007-210, Appeal from the Record of

Decision, Atlantic Rim Natural Gas Development

Project, Interior Board of Land Appeals, U.S.

Department of the Interior.

4 J.N. Dull, documentation and appraisal of known

gas seeps within Atlantic Rim coal bed natural

gas development area, 2007, Carbon County,

Wyoming, Rawlins Field Office, Bureau of Land

Management, U.S. Department of the Interior.
http://www.west-inc.com/reports/PAPA_2005_report_med.pdfhttp://www.west-inc.com/reports/PAPA_2005_report_med.pdfhttp://www.west-inc.com/reports/PAPA_2005_report_med.pdfhttp://www.west-inc.com/reports/PAPA_2005_report_med.pdf


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The ENERGY Reader

ENERGY

Edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerthner

Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth

Edited by Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner

What magic, or monster, lurks behind the light switch and

the gas pump? Where does the seemingly limitless

energy that fuels modern society come from? From oil

spills, nuclear accidents, mountaintop removal coal

mining, and natural gas fracking to wind power projects

and solar power plants, every source of energy has costs.

Featuring the essays found in ENERGYplus additional

material, The ENERGY Reader takes an unflinching look

at the systems that support our insatiable thirst for more

power along with their unintended side effects.

We have reached a point of crisis with regard to energy...The essential problem is not just that we are tapping the

wrong energy sources (though we are), or that we are wasteful

and inefficient (though we are), but that we are overpowered,

and we are overpowering nature.

from the Introduction, by Richard Heinberg

In a large-format, image-driven narrative featuring over 150

breathtaking color photographs, ENERGY explores the

impacts of the global energy economy: from oil spills and

mountaintop-removal coal mining to oversized wind farms

and desert-destroying solar power plants. ENERGY lifts the

veil on the harsh realities of our pursuit of energy at anyprice, revealing the true costs, benefits, and limitations of

all our energy options.

Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and

Post Carbon Institute. 336 pages, 11.75 x 13.4, 152 color photographs, 5 line illustrations.

$50.00 hardcover, ISBN 978-0970950086, Fall 2012.

Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and

Post Carbon Institute. 384 pages, 6 x 9, 7 b/w photographs, 5 line illustrations.

$19.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0970950093, Fall 2012.

Documents

Will Drilling Spell the End of a Quintessential American Landscape? — Erik Molvar