Aspen (c91) News

WELL, WELL, WELL

Five Western Slope Spots Dubbed ‘Too Wild to Drill’

By David Frey, 10-19-06

Two nearby natural areas and three others on the Western Slope are among 17 across the West dubbed "too wild to drill" in a report released on Wednesday by the environmental group The Wilderness Society.

The Roan Plateau and another area that includes part of the White River National Forest called Clear Fork Divide were included in the report, which also lists well-known natural spots considered for oil and gas drilling, including Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Wyoming's Red Desert. Five of the 17 places identified in the report are in Colorado.

"Our national energy policy is like 'Thelma and Louise.' It's pedal to the metal right off the cliff, and it's dragging our sustainable quality of life with it," said Sloan Shoemaker, of the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop. "Folks around here are saying, 'Enough.' We want something left after the boom goes bust and won't stand by watching as these last best places, like the Clear Fork Divide, are plundered for a few hours of energy."

The group's report looked at energy development plans across the West and estimated more than 118,000 new gas and oil wells are slated for public lands in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico and Montana over the next two decades -- a figure nearly double the 63,000 producing wells currently on public lands throughout the Rocky Mountains.

"It's a hugely aggressive effort to open the entire Western landscape to oil and gas production," said William Meadows, president of The Wilderness Society. "Drilling on this scale is already damaging many of these places. When you double the impact, you can just imagine what the damage to wild lands will be."

Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Jamie Gardner said she hadn't seen the report, but she worried its figures were overblown. Just because plans allow for energy development doesn't mean all the wells will be drilled, she said, and with new technology that drills multiple wells from a single pad, well numbers may not be a good way to judge environmental impacts.

"There's an impression that there is now or somewhere down the road in the future there will be development on every inch of public land," she told the Aspen Daily News. "The actual reality right now is, less than 1 percent of all BLM land is under oil and gas production. That's 9.8 million acres out of 260 million acres nationwide. That will kind of pull things back into perspective a little bit."

The Colorado places the report says are threatened by drilling are:
- The Roan Plateau: A vast mesa rising northwest of Rifle, home to wildlife, rare plants and native cutthroat trout, which sits on top of what is believed to be a rich supply of natural gas. The BLM has released a plan that would allow gas drilling in phases in an effort to reduce the impact, but environmentalists say the plan doesn't go far enough.
- The Clear Fork Divide: A roadless area on the fringe of the White River National Forest that connects the Crystal and Colorado River valleys, an area environmentalists say is a key migration corridor that hosts a vast aspen grove and old-growth spruce.
- Grand Mesa Slopes: Flanks of the Grand Mesa that make up the watershed for Grand Junction and Palisade.
- Vermillion Basin: A proposed northwest Colorado wilderness area, with rare plants and petroglyphs, ringed by oil and gas leasing.
- HD Mountains: A roadless area near Durango with what environmentalists say are the largest remaining stands of old-growth ponderosa pine in the Southern Rockies.

The list also includes four sites in Wyoming and eight others in Alaska, California, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico and Utah.

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