Seismic Exploration Pounds Upper Green River Basin

As summer turned to fall, 65,000-pound vibroseis buggies (commonly known as "thumper trucks") raced in a criss-cross pattern across Wyoming's Upper Green River Basin. Their mission: find the estimated 314 trillion cubic feet of gas that underlie the basin floor.

These exploratory activities are referred to as "geophysical" or "seismic" projects. Industry's goal is to generate three-dimensional maps that vividly display the strata lying, unseen, beneath the landscape. Once obtained, these maps will allow industry to identify potential pockets of oil, natural gas and coalbed methane.

This fall, industry focused its geophysical efforts on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM's) Pinedale Field Office. The Pinedale BLM has approved seismic exploration projects on nearly 900,000 acres of lands within the Upper Green River Basin, the winter home of Greater Yellowstone's big-game herds and one of our country's last strongholds for the imperiled sage grouse.

Despite the BLM's attempts to slide such projects through without public participation, they did not go unnoticed. Of the seven projects approved by the Pinedale BLM this fall, the West Pinedale 3D and the Big Piney 2D Geophysical Projects were the largest, allowing gargantuan thumper trucks to travel throughout a 1,200-square-mile area, laying cross-country vibroseis lines around the clock, creating a 100-foot-wide corridor and crushing up to 70 percent of the brush plants in their path. Such intensive activities transform an otherwise biologically rich and largely roadless area into a fragmented ecosystem that can be accessed by ATVs and other four-wheel-drive vehicles.

In late August, WOC, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and the Wyoming Chapter of the Sierra Club filed an appeal with the Department of Interior Board of Land Appeals (IBLA), asking it to halt the West Pinedale 3D Project because the BLM did not allow public participation, did not consider a reasonable range of alternatives and did not adequately analyze the environmental impacts that seismic exploration activities, together with other oil and gas development, have on the area's natural values.

While the IBLA denied our request to halt seismic activities, our efforts did not go unrewarded. The BLM argued that it could not legally deny industry requests to complete seismic activities even if the environmental consequences of such activities were significant. The IBLA patently disagreed, stating, "This assertion is flatly wrong." The board detailed its reasoning, concluding that, "In short, rejection of the WesternGeco proposal was and remains an absolutely viable alternative, and assertions to the contrary in the [environmental assessment] were clear error."

On November 19, WOC, together with a coalition of conservation groups, filed a second appeal challenging the Big Piney 2D Project. Our appeal detailed how the BLM relinquished its duties under federal law to analyze the impacts that seismic activities have on the landscape.

Specifically, prior to approving this project, the BLM:

• failed to survey for the imperiled black-footed ferret, an endangered species on the brink of extinction;
• failed to survey for white-tailed prairie dogs towns, which the ferrets rely on for their survival;
• failed to survey for sensitive plant and animal species, despite its admission that at least 34 of them could live within the project area;
• failed to survey for cultural and historic resources;
• failed to consider the impacts of future ATV and four-wheeler use in the area; and
• failed to consider the cumulative impacts of eight previous geophysical projects and at least seven proposed projects.

The BLM's leap-before-you-look mentality not only violates the agency's legal mandate to take a hard look at the environmental consequences of a project before granting approval, but also threatens the integrity of wildlands and wildlife in Wyoming's Upper Green River Basin. An opinion from the IBLA on this appeal should guide the BLM's environmental analysis of future seismic proposals.