J. M. Huber Withdraws from Bozeman Pass

Coalbed Methane: Score One for Aesthetics over Energy Development

By Marjorie Smith, 2-03-06

I’ve been a little surprised at the lack of excitement in response to the Bozeman Chronicle’s front page story this weekreporting that the J.M. Huber Corporation has given up its mineral leases in the Bozeman Pass area where they had proposed drilling for coalbed methane. Am I the only one in the whole valley exulting? “Aha! I knew it! I knew we could lick ‘em!�

Maybe we’re not safe yet. Maybe they’ll sell some of the leases to another company, someone with really deep pockets who can afford lengthy lawsuits. Perhaps I’m grasping at straws, in need of a happy ending. But in this age of rocketing fuel prices where environmental treasures in every corner of our nation are at risk in the name of energy independence, I find it reassuring that in my small corner of paradise the voices of people protecting their homes, their lifestyle, and yes, their property values, have triumphed – at least temporarily.

Maybe you had to be there to get the full effect of the drama.

For instance, maybe you had to be at the Student Union ballroom at Montana State University one August evening in 2001 when representatives from Huber, decked out in cunning matched gas station attendant outfits, explained their grandiose vision for Gallatin County in a tone that led me – and others – to start calling them the Hubris Corporation.

They came to us from Gillette, Wyoming, where mineral extraction jobs are the backbone of the economy and proposed to bring the same economic salvation to us. But the thing is, there isn’t a lot of unemployment in Gallatin County and very few people here dream of oil field jobs. And, as one Bridger Canyon homeowner told them, “Some of us in this room even have college degrees.�

I think what set him off was when the Huber folk explained what’s known as the split estate and is the crux of the problem as evolving centuries ago in Europe when kings found it in their interests to let peasants live and work on royal land without giving them full rights to it. Casting a large ballroom full of college professors, doctors and wealthy retired professionals as “peasants� did little to endear Huber and its plans to the Bozeman audience.

When my turn came to grab the roving microphone, I asked the guys from Huber if they had actually driven around on the ground before they chose their test well site or did they just look at a map: Yup, this is it. Bozeman Pass. Known coal deposits. Easy access off Interstate 90 (a straight shot from Gillette) on Jackson Creek Road, just a few miles up from the tiny former coal mining settlement of Chesnut.

At the meeting the Hubris folks assured me they had driven around the area. So they didn’t notice the one-room schoolhouse less than half a mile from their proposed test well? Or the very elaborate homes in the vicinity which rather than being occupied by people looking for jobs in the energy business belonged to folks who could afford to pay lawyers?

During those last two or three weeks before the world changed on September 11 folks in Bridger Canyon and the Bozeman Pass area got acquainted with neighbors they’d never known at informational meetings. I had owned land off Jackson Creek Road for over 25 years – land which I was on the verge of selling to my brother and sister-in-law. I joined 40 my brother’s future neighbors on a bus to Billings to attend the meeting of the state Board of Oil and Gas Conservation when it ruled on Huber’s request for permits to drill test wells. The Board listened to the Bozeman crowd politely, explained that state law didn’t leave them much choice, and approved the test well.

“Your big mistake,� one board member told some of us in the elevator on the way back down to the hotel lobby, “was not buying the mineral rights when you bought your land.� “But the mineral rights were never available to us,� we cried. When I bought in 1976 as when my brother bought the adjoining 18 acres way back in 1973, we barely noticed that the original land owners of the subdivision retained mineral rights. We were buying wildlife-blessed forest land with an incredible view of the Bridgers where we planned to eventually build homes.

But even at that Billings meeting when we were reminded how skewed Montana law is in favor of mineral rights owners as opposed to surface owners, I saw one glimmer of hope. The Huber representatives (replacing their cutesy gas station costumes with business suits in the big city) told the board they were withdrawing their request to drill a second test well off Trail Creek Road on the south side of Interstate 90 because it would cost them $50,000 just to build an access road to the site. Hmmm, I thought, these guys don’t have very deep pockets.

One other thing that had apparently escaped Huber’s advance men was that their very accessible test site off Jackson Creek Road was within the Bridger Canyon Zoning District, which I believe is the oldest rural zoning district in the state of Montana. So even with a go-ahead from the Oil and Gas Conservation board, they needed a zoning variance, industrial gas wells not being an approved use in the agricultural/residential/recreational Bridger Canyon Zoning District.

So shift the scene to various rooms around Bozeman as the newly-formed Park-Gallatin Alliance (formed to fight Huber, collecting donations under the auspices of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition) appeared at the zoning hearings armed with requirements they believed the zoning commission should demand of Huber. Some of these involved safety: training in fighting methane fires for the two rural volunteer fire departments that served the area plus money for additional fire trucks. Others dealt with requirements that would lessen the noise and traffic congestion that would be created by drilling the wells and provisions to protect wildlife migration routes. And of course there were requirements for handling the vast quantities of mineral-tainted water that is removed from the earth before the methane can be captured.

Living up to their nickname, the folks from Hubris dismissed each point out of hand. Their position was that they were the experts, they knew how to handle everything, we should just leave it to them.

Some Bozeman realtors researched what had happened to property values in other states that had been blessed with the extraction of coalbed methane. They testified as to what had already happened to real estate prices in the Bridger Canyon/Jackson Creek area since Huber had announced its plans and extrapolated what would happen to the country’s property tax revenues. Some of us thought the five members of the zoning commission (the three county commissioners, the country treasurer and the county attorney – four Republicans and one lonely Democrat) reacted particularly strongly to this information.

And finally, after several heated sessions in various venues, on January 11, 2002, in one of the exhibit buildings at the Gallatin Country Fairgrounds, an all-day meeting ended triumphantly with the zoning commission voting unanimously to deny the variance. It was a moment of exhilaration I have rarely felt -- in fact I was taken back to a day in Missoula in 1958 when Bozeman High School’s cutting from “Pygmalion� swept the top three awards at the state drama festival. There are these moments when you really think life will turn out right after all.

The Huber people immediately announced that they would sue for loss of their property rights. The Park-Gallatin Alliance folks pledged that they would raise money to help the county pay for its side of any lawsuit. Commissioner John Vincent, the lone Democrat, confided that he hoped that the next time around all the folks from Bridger Canyon and Jackson Creek Road would rally to the aid of “little folks� out in the center of the valley if some corporate entity wanted to take away their lifestyles and decimate their property values.

Now, four years later, Huber has sold their mineral rights. In at least one case, according to the Chronicle, the mineral rights went to the developers of an expensive new mountain subdivision in the Jackson Creek area. And while for some of us it was always a little awkward to find ourselves cheering for the rich owners of behemoth mountain mansions – even though many of them are personal friends of mine – we also knew that many residents in the Bridger Canyon Zoning District were people whose entire personal assets consisted of a small home and a few acres of land. It had become clear to us that the future of the Gallatin Valley lies in capitalizing on our scenic beauty, our wildlife, cultural and recreational resources, our clean air and pristine water and not on whatever minerals may be trapped beneath our mountains.

So I’m celebrating. Even while I wait for the energy giants to drop the next shoe.

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