Coal Bed Methane Boom Threatens Wyoming's Quality of Life

by Jill Morrison, Powder River Basin Resource Council

Coal bed methane development is booming in northeastern Wyoming, extending from north of Gillette to south of Wright and east to Buffalo and Sheridan. Leasing and drilling activities in the Powder River Basin have increased dramatically in the past year. Nearly 4,000 drilling permits have already been issued, and as many as 15,000 new wells are projected over the next decade, which will make the region "the biggest energy player in the U.S., maybe in the world," according to an industry spokesman.

With one methane gas well every 40 acres or less, the Powder River Basin will be dotted with wells and crisscrossed with transmission pipelines and roads. The purity of the area’s air and surface water is in jeopardy, along with the health of its fisheries and wildlife habitat. But the greatest threat posed by water-dependent coal bed methane drilling activities is to the quantity and quality of the basin’s groundwater.

Since methane gas development first began in the basin a decade ago, about 19,000 acre feet of groundwater has been pumped out of methane gas wells. (One acre foot equals 325,850 gallons of water.) Nearly half of this water has been pumped out in the past two years from approximately 700 wells. With a projected 20-fold increase in the number of wells over the next decade, the region’s groundwater supply is in serious jeopardy.

Yet the gas industry has convinced our elected officials and the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to speed up coal bed methane development in the basin by removing regulatory restraints, streamlining the permitting process and eliminating public comment opportunities. U.S. Representative Barbara Cubin (R-WY) successfully attached an amendment to the Emergency Supplemental Funding Act that passed Congress in late May which will provide $1 million over the next five years to hire outside consultants to help Wyoming BLM staff speed up the process of approving drilling applications.

Also in May, the DEQ authorized a general permit that reduces the approval time for certain types of water discharges from methane gas wells from as many as 90 days to 30 days and eliminates the public comment period. Only those landowners upon whose property wells are proposed will be able to comment on where and how the water should be discharged. Other members of the public can only protest after the permit is granted.

Is Wyoming willing to so easily trade our water, land, wildlife and air to become an industrialized sacrifice area for the rest of the nation? Has the rape-and-run crowd succeeded in rewriting our motto, "Development on Wyoming’s terms" to read, "Wyoming is Open for Business — at Any Cost"?

Conservationists, landowners and other water users are increasingly concerned about the specter of widespread environmental hazards associated with such massive industrial development. We must slow down and look beyond the seductive lure of short-term profits to the long-range consequences of large-scale methane gas development in the Powder River Basin: groundwater depletion and surface water pollution, soil erosion and land cave-ins, underground coal fires and explosions from methane seeps, air pollution from compressor stations and damage to fisheries and wildlife habitat.