By BOBBY MAGILL The Daily Sentinel
Monday, April 23, 2007
DENVER — When Ann Morgan was serving as Colorado state director of the Bureau of Land Management between 1997 and 2002, she saw firsthand, she said, how President George W. Bush’s administration immediately ordered the agency to make energy development top priority on public land when Bush took office in 2001.
The change was swift and dramatic, Morgan said last week in her ninth-floor Wynkoop Street office in downtown Denver. She serves as the Wilderness Society’s vice president of public lands.
Before becoming the state BLM director in Colorado, she served in the same role in Nevada for three years.
She testified Tuesday before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources to send one message to a Congress scrambling to deal with the long-range effects of America’s energy boom: The Bush administration’s bias toward widespread energy extraction on our public lands is wreaking ecological havoc throughout the Rockies.
Current administration policy, she said, is that any other legitimate use of land that gets in the way of energy development is seen as an “impediment” that should be removed.
“Our view is that the oil and gas development is a legitimate use of the public lands, but not everywhere on public lands and not in a manner that impairs other resources,” she said in her testimony.
Her claims were disputed by the ranking Republican on the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, Congressman Stevan Pearce, R-N.M.
Pearce dismissed Morgan’s claims as “wrong,” saying energy development occupies only a fraction of the BLM’s land nationwide.
Pearce, who represents oil-rich southern New Mexico, declined to comment for this story.
But Morgan said Thursday that the overall footprint of the small fraction of land that energy development directly affects is much, much larger.
“When you look at wildlife issues,” she said, “the footprint goes well beyond gas well pads.”
BLM spokeswoman Mel Lloyd said she disagrees with Morgan’s claim.
“We are a multiple-use agency,” she said.
Energy development is a critical part of the BLM’s program, she said, “just as important as the health of the land.”
Morgan said she believes the BLM’s mandate to make energy exploitation top priority is not only inappropriate, but it also steps on the toes of municipalities such as Grand Junction and Palisade.
“Best management practices,” or ways for energy companies to minimize their harm to the environment, shouldn’t merely be applied at the discretion of the BLM; they should be required, she said.
The BLM has the authority to mandate that Genesis Gas and Oil follow specific guidelines laid out in its proposed community development plan for the Grand Junction and Palisade municipal watersheds, Morgan said. But the agency chooses not to require it.
The watershed community development plan outlines how Genesis could drill the watersheds without harming water quality, but the plan is nonbinding and nonenforceable. A public meeting about the plan is scheduled at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Palisade Community Center.
“The agency is being pushed so hard that they’re not doing due diligence,” Morgan said, adding that if the Genesis plan and other best management practices were requirements rather than suggestions, “it would be seen as an impediment to the oil and gas resource.”
Lloyd said the BLM will require Genesis to develop the watersheds in a way that will protect natural resources.
Morgan’s past experience with the BLM with regard to the agency’s approach to applying best management practices doesn’t characterize the agency’s position on them today, Lloyd said.
What’s more, Lloyd said, the BLM’s new top priority is the Healthy Lands Initiative, which involves improving wildlife habitat and taking care of the land.
In Colorado, the initiative is focusing on the southwest corner of the state, where the agency plans to restore Gunnison sage grouse habitat and is intended to compliment energy companies’ land restoration work.
Morgan said she believes the BLM and Congress are moving too fast on commercial oil shale leasing in the Piceance and Uinta basins of Colorado and Utah.
The BLM is set to issue an environmental study of its oil shale and tar sands leasing program long before results of the six oil shale research and development projects in the region are known, she said.
“We think that’s putting the cart before the horse,” she said.
“How can you know what surface impacts you’re going to have until you know which technology you’re going to be using?”
The BLM anticipates beginning to issue commercial oil shale leases in 2008 or 2009.
The agency enforces the use of best management practices at its discretion, but there’s no reason energy companies can’t follow them and choose to develop public land wisely in a time when they’re making record profits, she said.
“If you can’t do it right here and now, when can you?” she said.
Here's a commentary piece by Ann Morgan. MtMiller or 1_p, you know anything about Morgan? I know she wasn't in your neck of the woods, but I thought talk might travel through the agency.
Restoring balance to the management of BLM lands
Ann J. Morgan
Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated:05/11/2007 06:12:43 PM MDT
Federal land managers have a difficult job, but it's made particularly tough when direction comes from Washington, D.C., to put oil and gas development ahead of all else.
In the late 1990s, when I was Colorado director of the Bureau of Land Management, balancing conservation and development was the main part of my work. I learned firsthand that it is possible to have a vibrant oil and gas program and at the same time protect our wildlife, air, water and places to hunt, fish, recreate and enjoy wilderness.
Back then, managers had the flexibility to avoid leasing in sensitive lands that were roadless or of wilderness quality. Today, it seems, those are the very places targeted.
Oil and gas development in itself is not the problem. The problem is that over the past six years, oil and gas development has become the predominant use wherever those resources might existThe BLM by law is supposed to be a "multiple-use" agency, and while oil and gas may be an important natural resource, so are those now taking a back seat - from wildlife and fisheries to recreation and cultural history.
The BLM's rush-to-drill policy is predicated on the false notion that restrictions impede energy development. But according to the agency's own analysis, most BLM lands, as well as the oil and gas resources in the five Rocky Mountain states containing most of those resources, are available for development, and they have been for a long time.
The agency, prodded by energy developers, is in a hurry, and planning for mitigating the impacts of development gets put off. The agency's multimillion-dollar Healthy Lands Initiative, for example, appears to be designed to restore lands harmed by oil and gas development long after the fact, instead of managing to avoid the impacts up front.
The BLM is opening ever more sensitive areas to leasing, even though the agency has become unable to meet its commitments to monitor impacts to wildlife and air quality. Over the past few years, the BLM has even leased more than 200,000 acres in Colorado and Utah that have been the subject of congressional attempts to designate them as wilderness.
According to the BLM's statistics, more than 36 million acres of the on-shore federal mineral estate are now under lease. Only 12 million acres, however, produce any oil and gas. Yet the agency estimates that more than a million more acres will be graded, drilled, built upon or disturbed by planned new oil and gas development.
This raises the question we should all be asking: Why does this administration have such a hunger to rush into new leases on some of our most sensitive Western lands?
While in Washington recently, I posed that question while testifying before the House Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee.
I presented several recommendations that also have been endorsed by a host of local and national organizations. Many of the recommendations involve reforms to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, such as requiring reclamation bonds to fully cover the cost of restoring damage to public lands and resources, ensuring that inspectors focus on inspection and enforcement activities and not on merely permitting more wells, and requiring the BLM to require adherence to "best management practices" designed to minimize damage from oil and gas activities.
I also asked that Congress consider limiting the BLM's ability to issue leases in areas that have been proposed for protection, identified as having wilderness characteristics, or that are included in Forest Service roadless areas. I stressed that, given the amount of leases already in place and the damage to our public lands that has already occurred, isn't it common sense to ask the BLM to reassess its approach to oil and gas development on our public lands?
The BLM has a proud mission, and I know firsthand that the agency is capable of making oil and gas available to the American people, while at the same time protecting the last remaining wild places in the West. Managing the region's birthright of public lands has always been a balancing act.
What we've been forgetting in this rush to please energy developers is what makes our region unique: the wildlife that live on our publicly owned lands, the quality of the West's air and water and the property rights of ranchers and farmers.
