DENVER – The Bureau of Land Management is offering more leases for drilling on public lands than the energy industry is using or asking for. That’s what the agency said in a wrap-up last week of its 2014 gas and oil lease and permit activity.
The BLM report said it approved almost 3,800 drilling permits and leased nearly 1.2 million acres of public lands to energy companies last year.
Whether that’s “enough” depends on whether you’re in the gas and oil business, said Jessica Goad, advocacy director for the Center for Western Priorities.
“You know, we’ll hear from industry that they don’t have any access whatsoever, but what we’re seeing from the statistics is that the BLM is actually offering far more than the industry wants to buy at this time,” she said.
The BLM’s tally is that 11 percent of the natural gas and 5 percent of the oil produced in the United States comes from sites on public lands and that slightly more than 2,500 new wells were drilled in 2014.
In Colorado, Goad said, it will be up to the governor’s Oil and Gas Task Force to balance energy development with residents’ health and environmental concerns.
Western Values Project director Chris Saeger predicted that the numbers will be spun differently by different groups – but they don’t tell the whole story. What’s important for Westerners, he said, is to keep an eye on the locations of any new leases that are proposed.
“What’s really at stake here isn’t the overall number of lands that are being put up for development,” he said. “It’s where are we doing it – and when it is happening, is it happening responsibly?”
The BLM recently deferred a land lease near New Mexico’s historic Chaco Canyon that would have allowed fracking.
Goad said only about one-third of the land already leased by oil and gas companies is being developed. The rest is not – which the BLM describes as “an area the size of the state of Florida.”
“Companies are just sitting on their leases, and that’s because it costs nearly nothing to rent those,” she said. “We’d like to see those rental fees increased, to discourage that sort of speculation on our public land.”
She said it currently costs “less than a cup of coffee” per year to lease an acre of public land.
The report is online at www.blm.gov.
