Lease sale generates barrage of protests
Posted by egable on April 24th, 2008 filed in Energy development
Several groups have filed protests of the Bureau of Land Management’s May 8 lease auction in Colorado, expressing concerns about the effects of oil and gas development on wildlife, wilderness and roadless areas, water supplies, air quality and climate change.
Colorado BLM spokesman Jim Sample said today the agency had received 97 protests.
The groups filing or joining protests include the Rocky Mountain Clean Air Coalition, Natural Resources Defense Council, Oil and Gas Accountability Project, Western Resource Advocates, National Wildlife Federation, Colorado Wildlife Federation, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Trout Unlimited, the Rio Grande and Saguache county commissions, the towns of Del Norte and Crestone, property owner associations and numerous individual ranchers. The Colorado Division of Wildlife has filed a comment letter signaling its concern as well.
Central to the protests are more than 145,000 acres in the Rio Grande National Forest in the western San Luis Valley, including more than 19,000 acres of roadless areas. A parcel has not been leased in the Rio Grande National Forest since 1994.
The Rio Grande National Forest is touted by the Forest Service as “one of the true undiscovered jewels of Colorado.” The Continental Divide runs for 236 miles along most of the western border of the forest., and the forest’s ecosystems range from alpine semi-desert grasslands to lodgepole pine forests overlooked by the rugged Fourteeners of the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness.
At 1.86 million acres, the Rio Grande provides unfragmented habitat for moose, greater sage grouse, bighorn sheep, elk, mule deer, American peregrine falcon, Gunnison’s prairie dog and bear, and is core recovery area for the endangered Canada lynx. Creeks and rivers in the forest support populations of native Rio Grande and Colorado River cutthroat trout and serve as the source waters for the Rio Grande and North Platte rivers, as well as the town of Del Norte’s municipal water supply.
Areas proposed for energy development by BLM parallel stretches of the Rio Grande classified by the Colorado Division of Wildlife as “gold-medal waters,” a designation reserved for the state’s highest-quality fish habitats. Only 168 miles of Colorado’s more than 9,000 miles of waterways have received such a designation, including 22.5 miles on the Rio Grande.
The region is characterized by steep slopes prone to erosion and landslide, adding to concerns about harm to water quality from oil and gas activities.
The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, in its protest covering more than 162,000 acres offered in the lease sale, said the BLM’s decision to lease areas of designated Rio Grande and Colorado River cutthroat trout habitat without consulting the Colorado Division of Wildlife violates the terms of conservation agreements signed by the agencies. TRCP also claims that BLM has failed to take a “hard look” at new information such as a 2006 study showing that sage grouse avoid energy development in breeding and wintering seasons.
In a protest filed by the San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council and the Citizens for San Luis Valley Water Protection Coalition, the environmental groups argued that federal energy planners have failed to analyze the impact of developing the forest’s 145,000 acres. Exploration and development would displace or marginalize the other uses of the forest, such as angling, hunting and camping and other recreational activities, that the BLM is legally obligated to protect, they argue.
The lease parcels include 23 grazing allotments encompassing 133,000 acres in the Rio Grande National Forest. Some of these allotments have been used by the same families for four generations, and ranchers are concerned that oil and gas development could make them unusable for livestock grazing.
Five of the lease parcels are in the sensitive watershed area created by the 2002 Million Fire. Local groups worry that further disturbance to this area will compound erosion and downstream sedimentation and prevent the recovery of wildlife habitats.
Some of the lease parcels are also within 2 to 8 miles of four designated wilderness areas, leading to concerns that they will be affected by noise, air and light pollution related to oil and gas development.
The Rio Grande National Forest also includes archaeological sites that have not been fully surveyed. More than 150 archaeological sites have been identified in the lease sale area, including at least 16 that are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and some that date back to the ice age.
Once a parcel is leased, the Forest Service, which manages the forest but not the minerals beneath, legally cannot prohibit future development. It can only try to minimize the impacts of development.
The management plan for the forest has not been updated since 1996. At the time, the Forest Service analyzed only 120 acres for oil and gas development, with a maximum number of 23 wells projected in its “reasonable forseeable development” scenario.
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