The Bureau of Land Management’s final plan for managing surface and mineral rights on millions of acres of eastern Colorado land sets aside key wild spaces and scenic river miles, but greenlights accelerating oil and gas drilling contributing to climate change, environmental advocates say.
The BLM on Friday released its final “record of decision” governing the resources on 650,000 acres of public land and 3.3 million acres of mineral rights across 37 counties, from Pawnee National Grasslands to South Park to the Upper Arkansas River Valley. The 500-page blueprint details what new lands should be set aside from any development, and where resources like oil and gas extraction can still be exploited.
“It’s an indicator whether the Biden administration is truly rising to the challenge of safeguarding both public lands and resources, but also doing their part to address very serious public health and climate crises,” said Jeremy Nichols of the Center for Biological Diversity.
On the latter count, the nonprofit group argues, the new plan fails.
“Unfortunately, the BLM maintains the status quo, which is basically the oil and gas industry can have whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and however it wants,” said Nichols, whose group estimates the plan allows for a doubling of oil production on public lands over 20 years. “And that is not a solution to both the climate crisis or the clean air crisis that is affecting the Denver Metro area and the Northern Front Range.”
Key oil and gas industry groups did not lodge significant protests to the final BLM drafts for eastern Colorado.
“BLM chose a balanced alternative, not the most extreme conservation-only alternative,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance. Of course some environmental advocates are not happy, she said, because they are “never happy unless a decision is made that shuts off all oil and natural gas, but that would be unlawful. BLM has a duty to balance energy development with environmental protection.”
Sgamma said the plan does include new restrictions on oil and natural gas development, “particularly as they relate to water quality.”
The Center for Biological Diversity and other groups had asked BLM officials to consider an alternative plan that would stop new oil and gas leases on BLM-controlled properties, which includes the mineral rights underneath surface land administered by the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and others. The center says it cannot do much about existing rights to drill on BLM land, but that the agency should have considered how new leases would contribute to future warming through methane leaks and fossil fuel burning.
Instead, the new BLM plan makes no discernible changes to future oil and gas leasing on BLM-controlled lands in northeastern Colorado, where recent state drilling activity is concentrated, Nichols said.
The resource plan does close nearly 37,000 acres in South Park to leasing, though another environmental group said those lands had little oil and gas potential.
The BLM’s Royal Gorge district office, which guided the resource plan, said the draft process included a long schedule of community meetings for input. The BLM’s call for public involvement included a first-time effort to divide the broad swath of Colorado into four geographic regions with a unique sense of geography and culture. South Park community advocates had a big impact on the plans, Royal Gorge district manager Keith Berger said.
The early 2019 draft of the now-final plan had only about 1,300 acres set aside for land with wilderness characteristics, Berger said, and public calls for more eventually pushed the BLM to set aside more than 114,000 acres in that protected category.
Oil and gas development was taken off the table for 93% of the Eastern Colorado land, he added. (Nearly all the mineral rights BLM deals with in Eastern Colorado are oil and gas, rather than coal rights the agency controls in other districts.) BLM decided to allow new oil and gas development in northeast Colorado, for example, in part because those areas already have oil and gas as a common land use, he said. Much of the BLM-controlled mineral right is interspersed with private lands where oil and gas drilling is already dominant.
If BLM stops new leasing, the technology of fracking allows a private well nearby to reach underground and take federal resources without compensating the U.S. taxpayer through royalties, Berger noted.
“It sets up a scenario where the federal mineral estate would still be drained by that adjacent development going on on private lands,” he said.
Reactions to the eastern Colorado plan were in contrast to summer responses to BLM plans for 2.2 million acres on the Western Slope. That long-term resource plan was credited more for large acreage set-asides from any development or extraction.
BLM plan sets aside some land
Some wildlife-focused groups praised parts of the BLM resource plan for land set-asides away from northeastern Colorado. According to Wild Connections, speaking for Audubon Rockies, The Wilderness Society and Rocky Mountain Wild, the eastern Colorado plan will:
- Expand protection for 115,000 acres as “lands with wilderness characteristics.”
- Set 101,000 acres as Areas of Critical Environmental Concern.
- Designate 87,000 acres as Backcountry Conservation Areas.
- Designate five river segments, totaling 60 river miles, on the Arkansas River and Eightmile Creek southwest of Colorado Springs, as potential Wild and Scenic Rivers System additions.
The Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, in a statement, singled out the backcountry designations as improving “how high-value fish and wildlife habitat is conserved and managed across these BLM lands,” Colorado field representative Liz Rose said.
Another “welcome safeguard” in the plan, an update of the 1996 plan, is the increase of setbacks for surface occupancy from a quarter-mile to a third of a mile from state wildlife areas, parks and conservation easements, the Colorado Wildlife Federation said.
Still, those wildlife focused groups were also critical of BLM’s decision to largely leave northeastern Colorado drilling in play.
“While we celebrate the new lands protections, it’s confounding that the final plan will increase climate-damaging emissions,” said Jim Ramey, Colorado State Director for The Wilderness Society. “Climate pollution from public lands and waters equals nearly a quarter of our nation’s annual emissions.”