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I rambled on for too long in the last post about the Bull Mountain pipeline and the Clinton Roadless Rule. Unfortunately, I’m not quite done with the subject. The somewhat bizarre (to me at least) interpretation of the Roadless Rule in the case of the Bull Mountain pipeline snaps into blurrier focus when considering the case of the West Elk coal mine’s efforts to capture methane gas, which I’ll describe for you as I watch Zella play in one of Fort Collins’s many fine dog parks.
(It’s funny the way different towns have different attitudes about dogs. In Moab, dogs are prohibited in city parks, even on a leash. Other municipalities worship dogs, constructing elaborate parks complete with exercise equipment and, in the case of Fort Collins, a giant swimming pool. In Boulder, dogs can own property, run for city office and bring civil suits.)
Anyway, in the last post I described the twenty mile-long underground Bull Mountain pipeline that travels through several inventoried roadless areas on the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre and Gunnison (GMUG) National Forests. A twenty-mile road is being constructed to build the pipeline and a right-of-way will be maintained for decades to service the pipeline with motorized vehicles. None of this, according to the Forest Service and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, constitutes road-building or a violation of the Roadless Rule.
The GMUG is also one of just four national forests in the country that has a coal mine within the forest boundary. Actually, I think they have several. One of the largest is the West Elk mine on the Paonia District. Methane, a greenhouse gas that that is almost 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2, gets released from rock formations during coal mining. In the West Elk Mine, the methane is vented into the atmosphere for workers’ safety (methane explodes). Local environmental groups, led by the Western Slope Environmental Resource Council (http://www.wserc.org/) have been pushing the company to capture gas, which can be used to generate energy (the mine uses a lot of energy), reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The company didn’t think the idea would pay, but under pressure to be a good corporate neighbor, they relented. Kudos to WSERC!
Problem #1: The BLM, which manages minerals (methane is a “mineral” in the federal mining/energy bureaucracy) underneath Forest Service land can’t just let the West Elk Mine harvest methane. They have to buy the methane via a competitive bidding process… even though the West Elk Mine is the only one who could conceivably make use of the methane (which is only released because of their mining). This problem, amazingly, got solved after several members of the Colorado Congressional delegation twisted different bureaucratic arms.
Problem #2: The surface above the mine—and the methane—is an inventoried roadless area. Harvesting the methane is essentially a matter of burying small diameter pipes overhead. But laying small diameter pipes violates the Roadless Rule, according to the Forest Service. So plans to capture methane are on hold.
Go figure.
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