BLM Finalizes Plan to Industrialize the Basin

by Tom Darin

In its never-ending zeal to drill for more oil and gas on public lands in the West, the Bush Administration released its final environmental impact statement (FEIS) for the largest oil and gas project ever proposed for approval by the U.S. Department of Interior: a plan to drill 51,000 coalbed methane (CBM) wells in Wyoming's Powder River Basin.

Lower Prairie Dog Reservoir, showing Leakage. Powder River Basin Resource Council

In February, WOC filed a protest of the FEIS, noting numerous flaws in the study, including serious water-pollution problems, the narrow range of alternatives considered by the BLM and the agency's failure to take a hard look at reasonable methods of handling CBM discharge water. We were not alone in our protest: our concerns are echoed in hundreds of similar appeals.

Soon after the BLM released its draft environmental study in January of 2002, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency blasted the study, giving it the agency's lowest possible grade for an environmental impact statement. High-level Bush appointees in the Department of Interior immediately intervened in an attempt to prevent the EPA from derailing the proposal. (See Frontline Summer 2002.) A year later, the BLM's final study tries to correct numerous problems in its draft proposal.

The FEIS contains hundreds of new pages of information, including new projections for ground and surface water impacts and significant changes in assumptions underlying the project. These suppositions include widely differing estimates of the amount of CBM discharge water that will "infiltrate" into the ground and recharge aquifers vs. the amount of water that will be poured onto the surface, affecting rivers and streams. Perhaps the biggest difference between the draft and final study is a new proposal to allow 3,000 to 4,000 infiltration pits to "handle" much of the expected 1.4 trillion gallons of water that will be pumped to the surface during CBM drilling.

The problem? The law requires that this type of information and changes in a proposed action be released in a supplement draft study so that the public and the scientific community can meaningfully digest and respond to it before the BLM can move on to a final document.

However, undertaking a supplemental study would have meant more time, and in this administration, "appropriate time" for public review is code for "unreasonable delay." And any delay is fundamentally at odds with the Bush National Energy Plan's fast-tracked, study-less-and-approve-now! mandate.

The rush to give industry an approved project left us with only 30 days to read the 2,000-plus page FEIS (not to mention several hundred pages of technical reports on water and air issues) and file a protest highlighting our main concerns. As usual with streamlined and hurried environmental studies, you get what you pay for, leaving us with many concerns.

Perhaps the most pervasive problem in the entire FEIS is that all impacts from water discharged onto the surface and into groundwater supplies during CBM drilling are purely guesses - a fact that even the BLM has publicly admitted.

Here's why. All of the water-handling options are assumptions that the BLM will not require. They are merely guidelines and estimates for how the agency thinks CBM discharge water will be handled in 10 different sub-watersheds in the eight-million-acre project area. The actual methods used to handle produced water will depend on a combination of industry practices, state-issued Clean Water Act discharge permits and landowner preferences.

As a result, the agency's assumptions may be terribly off. Currently, nearly 100% of CBM discharge water is either dumped onto the ground or in infiltration pits. If that continues to occur, the BLM's guess that a fair amount of the water will be handled differently (e.g., by treatment or re-injection) will generate a significantly different set of impacts than it predicted in the FEIS.

Given these external factors, the BLM should have analyzed different scenarios for what would most likely happen, given the reality that industry will handle discharge water using the cheapest (and likely most polluting) water-discharge permit it can obtain. That the agency failed to conduct such an analysis renders almost all impacts to ground and surface water resources, soils, vegetation and wildlife a series of guesses instead of an informed examination of the likely effects.

In our protest, we also pointed out many other deficiencies in the study, including its inadequate analysis of the impacts of infiltrating ground water as it sits in thousands of excavated reservoirs; serious weaknesses in water-well mitigation agreements for thousands of landowners' wells; and inadequate protections for air quality, surface waters, soils and vegetation.

Bolstering our protest of the FEIS, both the EPA and the National Park Service have also asked the BLM for a supplemental study, for primarily the same reasons.

Now that the BLM has received our protest, Director Kathleen Clarke has to resolve it - and the hundreds of others she received - "promptly." That's a legal requirement that this administration is certain to follow with enthusiasm.