Utah Oil and Gas Leases Threaten A Legacy of Roads

There’s been a lot of news this week about the Utah Bureau of Land Management’s recently unveiled oil and gas lease sale that includes parcels directly adjacent to Arches National Park (for update on recent developments see post script below). The National Park Service, local residents, regional environmental groups and even the local city and county governments have raised threats of legal protests or serious concerns. Mostly, their issue seems to be with the possibility of drill rigs visible from residential neighborhoods or just beyond the boundary of the park. The view from Delicate Arch, a landform freighted with state and even national symbolic weight, has been at the center of the controversy.

So far, BLM officials have mostly stuck to their script, offering the Park Service and the local community reassuring words about special visual and non-surface occupancy restrictions that would require the driller to locate their pad out of view, possibly even on some other adjacent land not included in the lease sale, using directional drilling techniques.

But in an interview in yesterday’s Salt Lake Tribune local BLM director Shelly Smith went off message when she acknowledged that, despite the specific regulations regarding views from parks and wilderness areas, she couldn't say whether those rules would prevent anyone from seeing oil and gas development from Delicate Arch. This was in direct contradicton to statements she made earlier that week before the local county council, which had expressed concern about the impact such development migh have on tourism — the mainstay of the local economy.

Here’s the view through Delicate Arch showing the hillside in the background that is proposed for oil and gas leasing.


As bad as that seems, there is an even graver problem hidden within the debate about viewsheds. Oil and gas developments require roads. Park Service officials raised the issue in a recent article in The Deseret News, saying those oil and gas roads will become “unwanted leftovers once the oil and gas are gone. The concern is that those roads will become new entry points into the parks, creating potential access and land-use headaches for park regulators.”

If the Park Service hasn’t already, they ought to take a look at the long term impacts from road networks left over from oil and gas developments in the Allegheny National Forest, a subject Wildlands CPR reported on last year in The Road RIPorter.

“As a result of this high level of oil and gas drilling, the Allegheny has the dubious honor of having as many miles of roads as much larger national forests in the western U.S. According to a 2003 roads analysis, the Allegheny has over 2,700 miles of roads, a figure that is undoubtedly much higher today given the rate of drilling in recent years...

“this high level of road development translates into extremely high road densities, fragmenting habitat for numerous wildlife species including northern goshawk, cerulean warbler, timber rattlesnake, and wood turtle. For instance, some areas of the forest have road densities exceeding 18 mi/mi2, a density that resembles an urban area rather than a national forest.”

Another facet of oil and gas roads are their impact to the local tourist economy. Ashley Korenblat, owner of Western Spirit Cyclery, member of the Utah State BLM Resource Advisory Committee and the Utah Governor’s Recreation Task Force, expressed concern about the threat that oil and gas development posed to mountain bikers and the hardscrabble, two-track trails they use in the region. During an interview with the Moab Times-Independent, she cited an earlier case where a popular mountain biking trail was “improved” in order to provide access for industrial development.

“Many trail users were dismayed a few years ago when operators of the potash plant smoothed the [Amassa Back] trail to access a natural gas pipeline that feeds the plant. In that case, the disturbances were as minimal as possible to allow one-time access for a limited number of vehicles. Setting up a drilling platform would require ongoing access by a large number of vehicles, which could mean significant grading on the route. Not only is the RMP silent on that issue, BLM policy would seem to encourage grading the route.”

The really sad thing is the way the Bush/Cheney administration has tried to use the problem of US depdence on foreign oil as a smoke screen to cover what many are saying is simply a land grab by oil companies as Bush is on his way out the door. As Karen Robinson, a Moab citizen concerned about the lease sale wrote in the Moab Times-Indpendent, it would appear to have little to do with solving America’s energy needs.

“Drilling on federal lands in the West over the last 15 years or so has produced an average of 3.6 days per year of oil – only 3.6 days per year! As of 2006, Utah had 1 million acres in production out of 4.6 million under lease. At the very least, we must require the oil companies to use the 3.6 million acres leased but not in production before giving them new lands.”

PS: Since this blog post was first published, the BLM has temporarily deferred approximately one-third of the parcels that the National Park Service and local officials had objected to. The long-term threat of these parcels someday being offered for lease still remains. The BLM needs to permanently withdraw these parcels from mineral development, a process that requires amending their recently finalized Resource Management Plan.

 

Sites that have picked up the story include:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/16/ennvironmentalists-slam-b_n_144...
http://jerrysplaceonthenet.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-selma-sierra-is-whor...
http://www.elearningservice.com/blog/2008/11/17/fire-sale-of-utah-land-n...
http://stonelight.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/698/
http://thesidetrack.blogspot.com/2008/11/drilling-lease-authorized-1-mil...
http://www.politicalgroove.com/environment-energy/11028-uproar-over-fede...
http://adizzylife.blogspot.com/2008/11/bush-administration-sneaks-one-la...
http://sciencepal.blogspot.com/2008/11/uproar-over-federal-drilling-leas...
http://www.helenair.com/articles/2008/11/17/national/top/75na_081117_dri...
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=111&sid=1519151
http://crap713three.blogspot.com/2008/11/uproar-over-federal-drilling-le...
http://www.twine.com/item/11n34tzct-13y/uproar-over-federal-drilling-lea...
http://www.kansascity.com/438/story/893663.htm
http://channels.isp.netscape.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1310&idq=/ff...