When the Bureau of Land Management Tres Rios Field Office completed its long-awaited – and long-overdue – resource-management plan for the land and minerals it manages, the agency was criticized for not using the tools at its disposal for more targeted management of gas and oil development.
The overarching planning document covered lands across eight counties and failed to take a close look at potential gas and oil development in areas near Durango, Hesperus, Mancos, Cortez and Dolores. The BLM has now committed to conducting a master leasing plan for these areas, giving the agency an opportunity to consider and mitigate the impacts that gas and oil development will bring.
Connie Clementson, the BLM’s Tres Rios Field Office manager, said that the master leasing plan process will allow the agency to take a closer look at acreage in La Plata and Montezuma counties “to determine if this area warrants additional stipulations or strategies for future leasing.” She is correct, and given the concerns raised previously about some of the acreage proposed for leasing, the master leasing plan is wholly appropriate.
The La Plata County Board of Commissioners has long been concerned about the BLM’s offering for lease 10,200 acres near Hesperus. The acreage had been nominated for leasing several times, most recently in 2013, when the BLM was still in the process of revising its resource-management plan. The commissioners sent a letter to the BLM requesting the agency defer leasing of these parcels until the plan was complete and also requesting the BLM conduct a master leasing plan for the area. The agency honored the deferment request but declined to conduct a master leasing plan, saying that issues including air and water quality, wastewater disposal, radiation and habitat degradation would be addressed in the larger management plan. They were not, and a closer look is needed before the acreage is leased.
The master leasing plan mechanism was introduced in 2010 nationwide as a means of providing a layer of planning and analysis to gas-leasing over a specific area. It allows for the BLM to call for best management practices, phased development and various stipulations that can lessen the overall impacts of gas development. That is particularly important when drilling is proposed in many sites across a BLM district. Considered individually, those wells might not convey significant damage to other resources nearby. In the aggregate, they may well leave a mark larger than the agency anticipates.
The BLM has a history of promising thorough site-level analysis of proposed drilling operations at the permitting process, then not delivering, citing the fact that the lease agreement implies permission to access the minerals in question, leaving the impacts not fully assessed. The master leasing plan tool prevents that shell game and offers the agency, gas and oil operators and neighbors the opportunity to consider the cumulative impacts that development can bring and offer ways of mitigating those. It is a useful tool for managing activities that are not entirely simpatico but must co-exist nonetheless. The BLM is right to commit to a master leasing plan for gas and oil development in La Plata and Montezuma counties.
