The Bush administration has been unfairly accused of ignoring global warming. Nothing could be further from the truth. The administration has a comprehensive plan for global warming: They plan to make it worse by accelerating the production and consumption of fossil fuels. In addition to renewing vows in our classic abusive, co-dependent marriage to Middle Eastern oil producing states, the administration’s plan for another decade of oil fixes takes square aim at the national forests.
A key feature of the administration’s 2005 Energy Bill is direction to the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to work together to expedite development of new oil and gas resources. It exempts much oil and gas exploration from the Clean Water Act. It provides for tens of thousands of acres of federal forest to be cleared to create new power transmission cables. And it gives out $85 billion worth of subsidies that will make previously uneconomic drilling in the backcountry turn a profit for big oil and gas companies.
By far the most dramatic effects I’ve seen from the national scaling-up of oil and gas development on national forests is on the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania, which already had more than 8,000 active oil and gas wells before the 2005 Energy Bill, more than all 154 other national forests in the country at the time.
The Allegheny National Forest Plan, completed last year, projects a total of more than 16,000 wells on the forest in 15 years. With the ink on that document still wet, the Forest Service planners who wrote it say that these estimates are almost certainly too conservative. By one estimate, there’s been more than 9,000 wells drilled in just the last two years.
According to the Allegheny Forest Plan, as of 2006, around ten percent of the 513,000-acre forest had already been cleared to make room for oil and gas developments. Extrapolating the Forest Service’s conservative estimates, this means that by the year 2022, more than a fifth of the total forest would be stripped of vegetation, converted to an oil field.
This is the most extreme case of oil and gas development on a national forest (private companies own the rights to more than 95% of the sub-surface estate on the Allegheny). But on almost every national forest I’ve visited, oil and gas development is a gathering storm cloud on the horizon.
On the Dixie National Forest in southern Utah, there’s a major energy development EIS process underway. The “likelihood of finding oil and gas is high,” one line officer told me. “There’s a lot of pressure on us, internally and externally, to get on with leasing.”
A White River NF (central CO) employee told me “oil and gas is huge on this (western) side of the forest.” There’s 78 active wells on the Rifle District of the WRNF, and the forest is in the process of completing a forest plan amendment to cover expected development in next ten years.
On the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre and Gunnison NFs, oil and gas development “has picked up some and it is controversial. We spend a lot of time on gas development.” There’s 16 wells on the Paonia district. The Grand Valley just got it’s first gas well and there’s 30 more on the way.
(I call all this stuff “oil and gas development” from force of habit. Mostly in Colorado it’s natural gas.)
Oil and gas development is “looming on the horizon” on the San Juan NF. There’s a couple hundred new wells going in every year.
I get the feeling that energy development is to the Rocky Mountains what “getting the cut out” used to be to the Pacific Northwest. Most of the Forest Service employees I’ve talked to have adopted a “doing the best we can with a bad situation” attitude.
“We’ve taken the approach that if we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it right,” one line officer told me. “We’ve told the companies up front that we’re going to do it differently on the national forests.”
“We’re trying to do better than our neighbors,” said another line officer two days later and a hundred miles away.
Hopefully the Rockies won’t look too much like the Allegheny.
Tomorrow I sort out roadless confusion in Colorado and assorted confused Colorado politicians.
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