Oil wells could soon dot the horizon near Bill Vance's farm, above. Photo © J.T. Thomas
After nearly a century of exposure to the deep snow and harsh sun of this unforgiving mountainous region, the wood in the old barn on Bill Vance’s farm has faded to a light gray. There are other signs of history on this 360-acre farm: the original homestead from the 1880s, newly re-stuccoed, that is home to Vance and his family; the rich soil that fuels Vance’s prolific organic vegetables; the rusty horseshoes and old elk skulls nailed to the shed. Beyond Vance’s broad green pasture, old ponderosa pines, some five feet in diameter and more than 400 years old, rise upon the surrounding hillsides of the San Juan National Forest.
“This is a huge corridor for elk and bears and mountain lions. It’s one of the last true corridors that’s unspoiled. I just love this place,” says Vance, as his young barefoot daughter Sadie, all legs and blond braids, chases a gray kitten across the grass. Vance grew up here, then left for a brief stint at college, but soon returned in 1975 to work the land. Today he raises goats, horses and chickens; puts up 5,000 bales of hay a year; and sells vegetables at the farmer’s market in Bayfield, twelve miles to the west. Although he works as a carpenter to make ends meet, he farms because, he says, “I feel obligated to take care of the land.”
Yet today, as Vance looks past his spread to the forested hillside, he frowns. The San Juan National Forest is considering a proposal to drill seventy-nine gas wells and build thirty-six miles of road in the currently roadless area that borders Vance’s farm on three sides. Over a mile from his house is the outcrop of a coal bed; just under the surface methane gas sits in the cracks of the coal layer and is bound to the rock by water pressure. To collect gas, companies will pump out the water and allow the gas to escape. Yet drilling for gas near the edge of the formation can be risky—in some cases when gas companies drill close to the surface, methane escapes through natural cracks and comes to the surface in the midst of people’s fields or domestic water wells instead of escaping into the well bore as intended. In the late 1990s, a gas company razed several houses near Vance’s property because gas, drilled on the outcrop, seeped into people’s homes through their water taps, rendering them uninhabitable. Even the U.S. Forest Service’s own environmental impact statement states that the drilling may affect Vance’s home, “exposing residents to safety risks.”
“They shouldn’t take the chance,” says Vance, shaking his head. “How can they endanger people’s lives in that way? I don’t get it. We could lose our homes, our farms, our water.”
Vance’s situation isn’t rare. The oil and gas industry has huge political clout: in the past three election cycles, gas companies made nearly $75.5 million in campaign contributions. Approximately fifty of the Bush campaign’s premier fundraisers are energy executives and nearly 60 percent of the top contributors hold leases on western public lands, according to a 2004 report by the Environmental Working Group. All this money appears to be having an impact.
In May 2001 President Bush issued an executive order asking that public land agencies such as the Forest Service increase the production and transmission of energy. That same year, he asked his cabinet officers to “identify ways your agency could expedite the review of permits or other authorizations for energy-related projects” and to “accelerate the completion of such projects,” according to a memo obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
This political climate, coupled with record high gas prices, Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq, means that it is now economically feasible to extract oil and gas from areas never before considered, regardless of roadless status or impacts to wildlife, water or those who live rurally, like Vance.
Since Bush took office, the Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for administering oil and gas leases on federal lands, has issued drilling permits at a rate 70 percent higher than before. On Forest Service lands, the number of wells has doubled in the past five years, with the vast majority of new wells located in Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. While Forest Service officials have no accurate data for the number of wells, they have leased 4.5 million acres of land to gas companies. In the face of this buildup, a broad spectrum of local governments, state wildlife agencies, outfitters, ranchers and farmers are fighting to preserve the land. Whether their voices will be loud enough to make a difference remains to be seen.
“All too often we find that decision makers on our public forests are influenced not by public comment, but by the power of large corporations,” says Gwen Lachelt, executive director of the nonprofit Oil and Gas Accountability Project, a network of 120 organizations from the United States and Canada. “It’s daunting what we’re up against in our effort to protect public lands. The toxic legacy being posed now by the boom in oil and gas drilling across the country is monumental.”
From the air, the Jicarilla District of New Mexico’s Carson National Forest looks like a spider web that’s been carved into the landscape. Colorado activists need look no further than here, just across the border, to bolster their dismay. Home to 700 gas wells, the 33,000-acre district is a maze of more than 400 miles of associated roads. While companies have been leasing the Carson for gas development since the 1950s, in the past five years the Forest Service and BLM have doubled the well density from one well every 320 acres to one every 160. Over the next twenty years, the number of wells in the area will double again, says Mark Linden, the Forest Service’s regional geologist.
Already, the effects on the land are significant. Trucks drive through constantly, hauling both water from gas wells and oil company employees heading out to read meters. The noise from compressor stations that suck gas from the ground can be as loud as an airplane’s roar. Amidst the litter, a fine layer of sandstone dust rises from the dirt roads in a haze.
“It’s an industrial zone,” says Jim O’Donnell, a former oil and gas employee who now coordinates the Coalition for the Valle Vidal, a nonprofit group in northern New Mexico that is fighting oil and gas development on the Carson. “You definitely don’t want to recreate in these areas. I’ve been to places I used to go to as a kid and you just don’t want to be there anymore. There are power lines, gas pipes and pipelines everywhere. You’ve carved up the landscape into 5,000 tiny little pieces that nobody can survive on.”
This fragmentation of the landscape does not bode well for mule deer and elk that spend winters in the area. According to aerial surveys conducted by the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, in 1999 the agency observed 987 elk and 1519 deer; in 2004 and the first nine months of 2005, the agency observed just 119 elk and 691 deer total. While a years-long drought also played a role in population declines, oil and gas development is definitely a factor, says Kathy McKim, a wildlife supervisor for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, based near the Carson.
“The wildlife does not like being disturbed. When they move in a rig, [wildlife] tends to move out until the rig is gone,” says McKim.
Oil and gas development also has major impacts on botanical resources. The new roads and swaths of land cleared for well pads lay a fresh landing strip for invasions of nonnative plants, explains Peggy Lyon, a botanist with the Colorado Natural Heritage program at Colorado State University.
“Any disturbance will encourage them to creep into the forest and displace the native plants,” says Lyon, sitting in her home office in Ridgeway, Colorado, while examining photos of yellow toadflax and oxeye daisy—flowers whose beauty masks their deadly impact on the ecosystem. “The things that evolved here are the things that the animals and plants learned to live with. You bring in something from the outside and its natural enemies aren’t here to keep it under control.”
Additionally, the effect of such industrial development on human health remains largely unknown due to a lack of research. Even so, doctors and citizen activists worry that there is cause for concern. The flaring of natural gas produced from gas wells may release chemicals such as benzene, a known carcinogen; hydrogen sulfide and mercury, both neurotoxins; and toluene, which the United States Department of Health and Human Services warns may affect the central nervous system, resulting in headaches, drowsiness, memory loss and nausea. These hydrocarbons don’t just seep into the air; they can leak from pipelines or wells into soils and underground aquifers.
“Anybody with any common sense could see this is a very serious problem. These constant low-dose exposures could lead to cancers, but the long-term delayed effects will be very hard to link to industry later,” says Theo Colburn, coauthor of Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival—A Scientific Detective Story, which looks at the harmful effects of synthetic chemicals. “Already there has been a flutter of people complaining about their health,” she continues. “It’s just insidious.”
These impacts are likely to increase due to recent amendments to national environmental laws. In the Energy Bill passed this past summer, Congress exempted oil companies from Clean Water Act provisions that require storm water plans to reduce polluted runoff from drilling sites. The bill also amended the Safe Drinking Water Act so that gas companies can inject, under high pressure, enormous quantities of water, sand and toxic chemicals into geological formations, including aquifers, to force gas production—without any regulation or oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency. That means the toxic components of fracturing fluids are not reported to any regulatory authority.
Yet the EPA analysis that led Congress to conclude that the industry exemption would pose no threat to underground sources of drinking water was based on the findings of a peer-review panel in which five of the seven members had ties to industry. In fact, hydraulic fracturing of underground coal beds could “endanger underground sources of drinking water and render these aquifers unusable as a future drinking water supply,” wrote Wes Wilson, a thirty-one-year EPA employee in Denver, in a 2004 letter to Colorado senators. “This fracturing process can create pathways which allow methane to migrate into high quality ground water.”
Aside from diminished laws to protect the public, the increase in new wells means that agency staffers have little time to monitor for potential problems. Throughout the region, BLM field offices, also responsible for Forest Service lands, met their annual environmental inspection goals only about half of the time during the past six years, according to a June 2005 Government Accountability Office report. One office in Buffalo, Wyoming—the field office with the highest drilling permit workload—achieved a mere 27 percent of its environmental inspection goal in fiscal year 2004.
In many cases, Forest Service employees aren’t taking up the slack. At best, the agency visits each well once per year to inspect the site for leaks, road erosion and other environmental problems. While the Southwestern Region in New Mexico has hired a few additional people in the past several years, the Intermountain Region, based in Utah, “hasn’t been that lucky,” says Barry Burkhardt, assistant director for minerals and geology. He adds that while those conducting oil and gas leasing analysis are supposed to be trained and certified, he has few such staff in his region. Instead, he says, “We’re defaulting to staff people that don’t have the level of experience that would raise my comfort level.”
“We have some units that are really stretching their people to make sure we get all the processing and monitoring done. Sometimes they come faster than we can handle it and we have to scramble to try and get everything done,” says Melody Holm, the Rocky Mountain Region’s program manager for leasable minerals. “Yeah, we’re short in a few places. I’m sure there are some cases where we aren’t as focused as we could be on particular operations.”
Holm added that oil and gas companies are likely doing a good job of monitoring because, “it’s in the gas companies’ best interest to monitor their production; it’s their livelihood to make sure facilities are maintained.”
O’Donnell, the former oil company employee from New Mexico, isn’t so sure.
“I’ve seen that all these companies can have so many regulations, but when they get out in the field, they have a complete disregard for the rules. They have no regard for the landscape.”
If so, that’s not good news for taxpayers. Bonds currently required to mitigate any environmental contamination are insufficient, according to a 2004 Associated Press analysis of federal records. Current bond regulations date back to 1960 and only require $10,000 per lease, regardless of how many wells are drilled—often as many as four per permit. The difference between bonds and actual cleanup costs could cost taxpayers as much as $1 billion if companies don’t act responsibly, says the report.
While the Forest Service can require additional bonds for surface reclamation if necessary—and officials at the San Juan National Forest say they plan to do just that in the area near Vance’s home—generally it’s a rare occurrence. The Southwestern and Intermountain Regions have never required additional bonding in states such as New Mexico and Utah, and the Rocky Mountain Region has only demanded it a few times, according to Forest Service officials in each region.
What complicates the agency’s job, though, is that most of the public doesn’t understand the agency’s mission, says Larry Sandoval, an oil and gas administrator on the Colorado White River National Forest, as he drives up a steep dirt road, past a sea of wildflowers, toward a few of the forest’s sixteen total wells.
“The National Forest Management Act mandates us to manage for multiple uses and that includes grazing and hunting and logging and trails, and [all-terrain vehicles] and oil and gas. Our challenge is how to manage those so that they mesh. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy,” he says, laughing. “We’re a consumptive society, whether for wood or minerals or oil and gas, and that has to come from someplace. I’ve always thought it’s pretty cool that we can meet our needs by managing these natural resources in a sustainable way. I think that industry has come a long way in recognizing that if they want to be around, they have to work within the [boundaries] of us managing for other uses. I think so far we’ve mostly been able to stay on top of that.”
Yet as we near the crest of the road, an environmental consultant for a gas company meets us with some bad news. “We just had another pipeline blow out this morning,” he tells Sandoval, explaining that an old pipe buried in a nearby ditch had ruptured. A few days before, the same thing had happened in another section. The company, he reports, had already shut down the well to prevent more leakage and had submitted soil samples to check for hydrocarbons and salt levels.
Still, the news troubles Sandoval, and he asks that before the company even receives the results, it replace the pipe. A few days later, the tests come back negative; no solvents or gas escaped into the ground. Yet this potential for things to go wrong is exactly what worries activists and outfitters who care about these areas.
Sloan Shoemaker, director of Wilderness Workshop, an Aspen, Colorado–based nonprofit, looks down from a Cessna onto the White River National Forest about fourteen miles from where Sandoval saw the pipeline leak. Under the Clinton administration the land, which is home to the largest contiguous aspen forest in the country, was designated as roadless. Today, a freshly dug road and well pad cut a scar into a blanket of green trees.
“Goddamn it,” whispers Shoemaker. His organization had appealed the lease on the grounds that a 1993 environmental impact statement excluded any surface occupancy on all roadless areas. Yet this lease was from 1987 and was up for grabs. That shouldn’t matter, he says.
“There are a few places that are too wild and too precious to be developed. They’re a remnant of our national heritage,” says Shoemaker, leaning out the plane window as he looks toward the red rock mesas and thin streams that weave through the landscape like silver snakes.
“We’re talking about the waning days of the fossil fuel industry and this is just the last gasp until we make the transition to renewable energy. We shouldn’t ruin the last best places in the process.”
Once roads are built, he says, it’s nearly impossible to keep recreationists and all-terrain vehicles out of the area. And then the impacts to the region play out like falling dominoes.
In an effort to stave off the growing wave of development, he and other activists scattered throughout the Rockies are working to educate the public and push for new public policy. However, real change on the ground is more likely to come in small victories than one broad change in national policy. This past summer, for example, citizens in rural western Colorado succeeded in deferring a gas lease on the Gunnison National Forest after more than 200 locals and all the area governments signed protest letters and contacted the Forest Service and their local representative. A local environmental group also showed the agency that it was planning to allow drilling in a riparian area with steep, erosion-prone slopes.
“Stuff like this gives me hope,” says Pete Kolbenschlag, the West Slope field director for the Colorado Environmental Coalition. “This shows very clearly that concerned citizens, when they get involved, can make a difference. What we’re doing is a mainstream issue; it has such a broad base of support.”
Even so, farmer Bill Vance, whose wife works for the Forest Service, knows intimately the nuances of this fight, how hard it will be to stave off development and preserve the safety of his historical farm.
“The public lands agencies are walking a tightrope. I get the feeling that the people in the Forest Service and the BLM at the lower levels are against them drilling recklessly. We’ve all been going to meetings and they’ve been packed and everybody’s against it. But then they’ve got these gas companies screaming and they’re fully backed by our current government. The people in D.C., they’re not here, they don’t know. To them it’s just a map,” says Vance, shielding his eyes from the glaring sun that rises high over the nearby forest. “I just don’t see that they have any concern for your average Joe farmer.”
Thanks to Bruce Gordon and EcoFlights for providing the aerial view of the White River National Forest.