Progress for Colorado
Governor signs major revamp of industry-dominated state oil and gas commission, Colorado’s Landowner Protection Act, 2007:

Take Action to Protect Perins Peak!

In 2008, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) received a request to lease for oil and gas development thousands of acres of federal mineral rights within the Perins Peak State Wildlife Area, immediately outside of Durango.

BLM Proposes More Leases in La Plata County

Plans to auction 16,000 acres of mineral rights underlying private and public land in western La Plata County (map) caught landowners and elected officials by surprise when announced by BLM in December, 2008. UPDATE: In response to overwhelming public outcry, BLM has pulled all of the leases from the scheduled February, 2009 auction.

It’s not that La Plata County is unfamiliar with natural gas extraction. It’s just that the new proposal lies distant from where anyone anticipated more gas development might occur. The interest to explore Cherry Creek and locations west of the La Plata River highlights the fact that any area underlain by sedimentary formations such as shale are possible sites for exploration and drilling.

The entire county is already leased within the coalbed methane-producing zone, the area south and east of the Fruitland formation outcrop. Landowners there have seen a continually creeping expansion of drilling, first one well every 320 acres, then one every 160 acres, and more recently industry requests for wells every 80 acres. Drilling in the new zone in western La Plata County could result in a well every 40 acres. Consider that every 35-acre tract, such as those in the new highbrow Indian Shadow subdivision proposed north of Hesperus, could see a gas well. The idea brings landowners up short.

Aserious concern is BLM’s lack of accurate and current environmental analysis of gas development impacts. The BLM is relying on a 1990 amendment of a 1985 management plan to assess the consequences of gas development in 2009. The documents are laughable in their cursory consideration of major impacts. For example, the 1990 documents figures that there are no air quality impacts associated with gas development, and presumes incorrectly that methane from coalbed drilling will never migrate to the surface. That assumption was proven catastrophically incorrect in the early 1990s when homes were evacuated and demolished precisely because of methane seepage.