Can We Find a Way to Protect the Upper Green’s Riches?
Sublette County Heating Up For Battle Over its Conflicting Treasures: Natural Gas and Natural Resources
by Molly Absolon
 The Upper Green River Valley inspires one to wax poetic: the rampart of the Wind Rivers stands like a great barrier to the east, its craggy peaks and deep canyons look as wild and untouched as they did nearly 200 years ago when Europeans first descended into this high valley. The Gros Ventre and Wyoming Ranges complete the arc of mountains surrounding the area. To the south, the Upper Green spills out into the Red Desert. Rivers weave through the bottomlands creating lush habitat for bald eagles, osprey and native trout. And the vast herds of pronghorn, mule deer and elk that winter here have inspired people to compare the Upper Green to Africa’s Serengeti Plain.
“I love this place,” says Linda Baker, a longtime Sublette County resident and the grassroots organizer for the Upper Green River Valley Coalition. “When I first came here 22 years ago, I was in awe of the mountains and scenery, and I still am. “People come to visit this sublime landscape from all over the world. It’s why we choose to live here,” she continues.
But the sublime landscape is threatened by what Baker calls the “perfect storm” of development: abundant natural gas reserves, high demand, and improved technology. The Upper Green happens to sit on top of one of the nation’s richest natural gas deposits—an estimated 300 trillion cubic feet or enough to fuel the nation’s natural gas consumption for 14 years at its current rate. These factors have come together to create a boom that may bring as many as 10,000 natural gas wells into the Upper Green River Valley over the next 10 years.
“We used to be the least populated county in the least populated state,” Baker says. “Now we are the fastest growing county in the state.
“There’s only one grocery store in town. It is where we do a lot of our socializing. You used to know everyone you ran into there. Last summer when I went into the store, all I saw was a sea of strangers. It feels a bit like you are traveling, but you are not going anywhere.”
She adds: “These people aren’t all bad, we just don’t know our neighbors anymore.”
Not knowing your neighbors is one thing, but the changes run deeper. Sublette County is right behind Teton County in terms of cost of living. Baker says crime rates, domestic violence and drug use are all on the rise. It is harder to find parking places, the police force is the biggest it has ever been, and you can no longer call up the one doctor in town for advice or a quick appointment.
Sublette County also has new state-of-the-art patrol cars, a new senior center, a new library addition, school additions, bonuses for teachers, and new computers in every classroom. Plans are in the works for a $300,000 playground, a $27,000 grand piano for the schools, and a new community ice rink—all this for a town with a population of 1,400.
John Fandek, a 42-year-resident of the Upper Green River Valley, says this money is putting blinders on people. (See related story in this issue) “People just want more,” Fandek says. “Industry is dropping money everywhere—$100 here, $1,000 there. People fall all over themselves for that money. There’s no talk around here of reducing consumption, just of drilling for more.”
Lauren McKeever, the Upper Green River Coalition’s campaign coordinator, acknowledges that money has brought changes, both good and bad to Pinedale and the surrounding areas.
“Money changes everything, but how do you put a price tag on a view?” she asks. “I’ve noticed hazier days this winter…do we have to wait until we have more asthmatics before we say something about our air quality? Money shouldn’t be the linchpin our future is hung on.”
“I know we are going to have change,” Baker concedes. “But I want to make sure we understand what that change means for our quality of life, our wildlife, and this incredible landscape. We can make choices now that will affect what we leave for the future.”
The Storm Hits
The Upper Green River Valley’s perfect storm hit this spring. In February, the Jonah Infill Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), calling for an additional 3,100 wells in the already highly developed Jonah Field south of Pinedale, was released. The Environmental Impact Statement for a 210-well coalbed methane project near South Piney is due out any day. And the Pinedale BLM Field Office’s Resource Management Plan, which was supposed to be out last spring, is now scheduled for release in May or June.
“The pace is overwhelming,” says McKeever. “The Jonah Infill DEIS alone is 700 pages long and we have more huge planning documents coming. Not only is it overwhelming for those of us who are charged specifically with responding to these plans, it is overwhelming for the community, and overwhelming for the little BLM office here in Pinedale.
“The problem is that we get so inundated, we can’t respond appropriately. Development gets muscled through, and managers make very poor choices,” McKeever continues. “Overall, Wyoming is a moderate, reasonable state, but the pace of these actions defies moderation.”
Doing it Right
The Upper Green River Valley Coalition’s solution to the rush is what they call the Responsible Energy Development Proposal, which is a “road map for doing it right” in the Upper Green. Their hope is that the proposal will be incorporated by the BLM into its resource management plan. The Wyoming Outdoor Council, which is a member of the Coalition, supports the proposal and is actively working with Baker and McKeever to help promote it.
Some of the measures called for in the Responsible Energy Development Proposal include directional drilling to minimize the amount of surface disturbance; pipelines to reduce truck traffic; flareless well completions to lessen emissions; and staged development to flatten out the boom-bust cycle.
“What we are promoting is a moderate position,” McKeever says. “We want development done at the right place and right pace.
What’s at Stake?
Wyoming Outdoor Council members are well aware of what is at stake in the Upper Green. The broad stretches of sagebrush steppe that lie between the area’s mountains provide the largest block of publicly owned winter range in Greater Yellowstone. Out in the open flats, more than 40,000 pronghorn spend part of the year side-by-side with a total of 60,000 mule deer, elk, moose and bighorn sheep.
 For years, the BLM held this winter range as sacrosanct. The Pinedale Anticline was closed to all forms of recreation to protect wintering animals. In 2004, however, Questar Exploration and Production Company was given permission to drill in the winter on the Anticline in spite of opposition from conservation groups. This was not the only exemption to regulations designed to protect wildlife. During the 2002-2003 winter season, the Pinedale BLM Field Office received 173 industry requests for exceptions to protective sage grouse rules. The BLM granted 157 of them, or 90 percent. The office also received 61 requests for exemptions to raptor stipulations and granted 56.
Mitigation measures have been attached to these exemptions, but the on-the-ground impact is that critical winter range like the Anticline—once a place where there was virtually no human presence from December until April—is now open for business year round.
People often cite the fact that they see big game grazing near gas wells as evidence that the two can coexist, but scientific studies released this past fall indicate that at least as far as mule deer go, the image of harmony is misleading.
Hall Sawyer (see accompanying story), a wildlife biologist based in Laramie, has been using radio collars and Global Positioning Systems to track mule deer in the Sublette herd that winter on the Pinedale Anticline. His project, which notably is partially funded by the oil and gas industry, began in 1998, three years before there was significant oil and gas activity on the Anticline. His findings to date indicate that mule deer habits have changed dramatically as a result of the drilling activity. The animals consistently avoid areas close to well pads and associated roads. Many of these areas were preferred habitat prior to development.
“I’m worried,” the Upper Green River Valley Coalition’s Baker says. “It’s a false hope to think just because you see deer or pronghorn around a rig that you can tell they are doing well enough to persevere. There’s a problem with that thinking. You need scientific data, and we are just beginning to get that. By the time you see a decline it may be too late to prevent a crash.”
It’s not just the winter range that is threatened. The migration paths leading from summer ranges in the mountains down into the Upper Green River Valley—including the longest migration path in the Lower 48, a 160-mile journey taken by a small herd of pronghorn from Grand Teton National Park south into the Pinedale area—are getting pinched off by development, roads and subdivisions.
 The most famous of these bottlenecks is Trappers Point, where the passage narrows to three-quarters of a mile. These bottlenecks are getting increasing attention, due in part to work by the Wyoming Outdoor Council’s Meredith Taylor and the Restoring Wild Patterns Program. A working group has been established by the BLM to allow stakeholders to weigh in on the future of Trappers Point in particular. Conservation groups, including the Wyoming Outdoor Council, are also beginning to look toward congressional designation of a National Wildlife Migration Corridor in the Upper Green.
Clean Air & Clear Skies
McKeever says it seems as if things have gotten hazier around Pinedale this winter, but she only has anecdotal evidence. Daniel resident Perry Walker, who is a retired Air Force major and a physicist/ nuclear engineer, has been working to document the changes.
“We are currently seeing significant degradation in visibility in the Upper Green which strongly appears to be connected to oil and gas extraction work,” says Walker. “Furthermore there are certain chemicals being dumped into the air by well-completion flaring that may possibly have a negative effect on human health.”
Walker believes that strict emission controls to limit the amount of material being poured into the air should be a condition for doing business in the Upper Green, but industry has complained about the cost of added regulations. Their cries seem disingenuous, however, given the healthy earnings posted by the oil and gas industry last year.
According to the media, profits last year were in the billions for the top 10 oil companies, with an average increase of 30 percent. Natural gas production from onshore federal lands increased 42 percent between 2003 and 2004.
Making a Difference
Baker, McKeever and others hope that the energy industry’s current financial status will help their own efforts to promote “doing it right” succeed. It becomes hard to claim we can’t compete because of all these environmental regulations when your company is making billions of dollars annually.
“My hope is that we can succeed in convincing the BLM to require the best possible gas strategies in the world here,” Baker says. “One well per section is possible; they do it in the Middle East. There are technologies available to reduce the impacts to our grand 100-mile vistas. We can do those things.
“I’m hopeful. It has become a personal crusade for me. This is the only the way we can preserve the future for Wyoming’s children.”
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