When Access to Government Lands Really Means No Access

Imagine renting a car without tires or the steering wheel – or renting a house and being allowed to use only the roof. Do you really have a car if you can’t drive it? And what good will it do you to rent a house if you can’t live in it? That is essentially what we’re looking at when we talk about leasing multiple-use government land for oil and natural gas exploration in much of the American West.

Environmentalists claim 95 percent of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in the five Rocky Mountain states is available for leasing. They use this figure to bolster their arguments that there is no basis for industry’s claim that access is a significant barrier to oil and gas development in the Western states.

• But a lease that cannot be developed – like an unusable rented house or car – is a lease in name only.
  
  
• For example, according to the Wilderness Society’s own report, more than 50 percent of BLM land in Wyoming is off limits or carries restrictions above and beyond the normal environmental stipulations, some of which effectively make development impossible.

Often, getting a lease is not the most significant problem to developing oil and natural gas from government lands. Difficulties in acquiring permits to drill wells and overly restrictive lease stipulations are responsible for limiting natural gas production.

• These are restrictions that prevent economic development of the lease without commensurate environmental benefit.

Looking at the number of leases doesn’t give us an accurate picture of the situation.

• What we need to look at is the number of federal acres that are actually producing oil or natural gas. In the five Rocky Mountain states, that amount has decreased by 19 percent in the last decade – a startling change, given the fact that our demand for energy has grown 17 percent over that time.
  
  
• Almost half the nation’s untapped natural gas on multiple-use BLM lands in the Rockies is in areas restricted by excessive stipulations laid down by one federal agency or the other.

The 95-percent figure does not take into account government lands controlled by agencies other than the Bureau of Land Management.

• Not all western lands are BLM lands. Other federal agencies manage such lands, among them the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the departments of Defense and Energy.
  
  
• Each of these agencies has its own set of restrictions. The Forest Service, for example, has its roadless area regulation withdrawing more than 58 million acres of multiple-use acreage, which has removed at least another 11 TCF from natural gas resources.

In addition, there are resources found on nearly 10 million acres of non-federal land in the Rockies that is surrounded by no-access or limited-access federal lands, and so is effectively precluded from development.

Stipulations are not the only impediments to bringing the oil and natural gas to America’s consumers.

• Inadequate agency resources in many BLM offices and required but outdated resource management plans often make it difficult to get drilling permits, seriously delaying viable projects for up to 100 days, or sometimes years.
  
  
• In the Rawlins, Wyoming, BLM office, thousands of Applications for Permits to Drill are awaiting action because of manpower shortages.
  
  
• In the Buffalo, Wyoming office, thousands more are not being accepted by BLM because of limitations of the resource management plans (RMP) for the area.
  
  
• Updating these RMPs and RFDs takes the BLM two or more years to complete thus preventing any further oil and gas activity in that area until the plans are finished.

If the restrictions are so bad, how then, to explain the 77 percent increase in natural production during the last 10 years on federal lands in those states?

• The answer is technology. The industry’s cutting-edge technology has allowed it to extract more oil and natural gas from its existing leases.
  
  
• But even the best technology has its limits and eventually, without greater access to other government lands, production will decline.

Given the tightness of the natural gas market, it is essential that industry and government work together to increase production from all areas, including multiple-use government lands.

• Ultimately, it is the American consumer who is likely to suffer from a failure to address this critical situation.