December 16, 2015 10:40 AM UTC

Oil & Gas Lease Hoarding Threatens Iconic Colorado Public Lands

• 6 Comments
• by: PKolbenschlag

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Over three million acres of America’s Public Lands are being held hostage by the oil and gas industry, padding private portfolios and spurring speculation at the public’s expense.

This is according to a recent report by The Wilderness Society, “Land Hoarders: How Stockpiling Oil and Gas Leases is Costing Taxpayers.”

Oil and gas companies are supposed to develop the public land leases they are privileged to hold in a timely manner, or give them up. These lands have been set aside under energy leases for the benefit of the American taxpayer. However, oil and gas operators have made a habit of exploiting loopholes known as “suspensions.” These companies effectively take the control of the lease out of the hands of public officials, and off the books—by stockpiling leases.

The public lands being manipulated this way are not far off or forgotten. Nor are they just reserves on company books, nor map layers on an agency scoping document.

The lands locked up in these suspended leases include some of Colorado’s most prized places. Iconic landscapes. Critical habitat. Names that matter to people and communities, public lands like the Thompson Divide.

Millions of acres of public lands sit in limbo under suspended leases, and can remain that way for decades. The BLM routinely grants suspensions, in many cases for questionable reasons.

At Thompson Divide, for instance, the campaign to protect the area has achieved national prominence. And recent events there include a decision that the BLM is considering to cancel some unlawful leases in the area; as well as the decision in the new National Forest plan to close the area to further leasing.

One drama-prone county commission is even following the lead of the oil and gas lobby, announcing a “boycott” of a public meeting that the BLM is holding.

SG Interest, one of the companies impacted by the Thompson Divide leases and Rep. Scott Tipton’s number one benefactor, is scrambling to get out of its poor investments there by figuring out how to bill the public or to ditch its holdings there for others on another National Forest where it is likewise mostly not wanted.

So it’s not like the lands being locked into these lease limbos are unimportant to communities, to Colorado, and to the nation. And yet they languish.

Lesser known than Thompson Divide, sitting in the far northeastern corner of Mesa County, South Shale Ridge is a fascinating and colorful landscape.

South Shale Ridge is a place of goblins and hoodoos amid legacy Ponderosa that rise incongruously from desert rock and mud.

South Shale Ridge sits mostly hidden near DeBeque in a space between the greater Roan Plateau and the Bookcliffs, and glimpsed to the north from I-70 before you drop into the canyon westward toward Palisade.

But other than to the off trail explorer, an adventurous wild horse enthusiast or dirt biker, or perhaps a Landman, South Shale Ridge is known for conflict. Like Thompson Divide, South Shale Ridge is a long-sought conservation prize for its wildness, its unique features, and its critical habitat.

Although less the hot than its counterpart on the forest to the south, South Shale Ridge nonetheless finds space in the news, not often but regularly in tales of land use, agency planning, and protracted oil and gas battles.

South Shale Ridge has long been a contested area, from the days of the first BLM inventories in the late 1970s, fought over for its unique wilderness features and for the natural gas deposits that lie beneath.

One is a dwindling feature of the landscape. The other is ubiquitous, glutted, if-only-we-could-get-it-to-China, a burden on the market, where-the-hell-can-we-stick-it-all. But no matter that latter bit about relative natural landscape vs. mineral values of these public lands. Many have already been leased by the U.S. Department of Interior Bureau of Land Management for oil and gas development.

What I said then (in 2006) holds true today. And the matter I was commenting on then, still holds these public lands as hostage against public sentiment and agency data.

“By allowing gas drilling on these lands, the agency is ignoring public opinion and the conclusions of its own multi-year process,” said Pete Kolbenschlag, lands defense coordinator with the Colorado Environmental Coalition.

And now, after decades of conflict, wilderness bills, land inventories, lawsuits, policy reversals and re-reversals, and the BLM acknowledging that South Shale Ridge is replete with unique wilderness qualities, the issue is once again back up for consideration as the BLM seeks to resolve these competing visions for the public’s estate.

Over 40 miles of arroyos snake through the sometimes otherworldly and always wonderful wildlands of South Shale Ridge. And, with some luck or skill, these circuitous routes can bring you back to your truck parked on the packed mud of Winter Flats.

Which brings us back, also by indirect route, to the broader issue of our public lands. And specifically to those being held hostage to the oil and gas industry, locked up as private assets with a bill coming due to the U.S. taxpayer.

At South Shale Ridge conservation groups have generally held off oil and gas drilling, despite the years of industry and agency effort. After filing suit on the oil and gas leases at South Shale Ridge, and prevailing, conservationists had hoped the BLM would move to cancel the offending, and unlawful, leases.

According to The Wilderness Society – which has long advocated for America’s public lands including for the Thompson Divide area and South Shale Ridge – over one-quarter of a million acres of Colorado’s public lands are being held in limbo by the oil and gas industry, speculators, and other private parties.  For places like South Shale Ridge this can seal their fate regardless of the purpose, one hopes, of the oil and gas leasing program. The Wilderness Society report notes:

The BLM is treating the suspended leases in South Shale Ridge as valid existing rights that preclude managing the area for its wilderness characteristics, despite the fact that a federal court invalidated the leases eight years prior and the BLM has not moved forward with environmental analysis on the suspended leases in that time. The leases are precluding multiple use management of South Shale Ridge, while not generating energy or revenue for the U.S. taxpayers who own those minerals.

Lease suspension turns the idea of public benefit on its head, and places top quality public lands in an agency purgatory that is hell on the American taxpayer by one analysis:

While suspensions can be a useful (even necessary) tool, current suspensions include millions of acres that have been on hold for decades and have already cost taxpayers more than $80 million in lost rents alone. Lease suspensions are cheating U.S. taxpayers of rental and royalty payments. Lease suspensions can allow industry to evade Congressional intent to diligently develop and provide timely and reasonable access to federal oil and gas resources. Lease suspensions can preclude the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) ability to achieve its multiple-use mandate that could allow for recreation, scientific exploration and protection of cultural and Native American resources.

The Wilderness Society recommends four sensible steps to start reforming the oil and gas leasing program and the widespread abuse of lease suspensions.

• BLM must review and lift suspensions on all leases where there are no valid reasons to continue suspension; cancel all those that have expired.
• Congress should request a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation to identify and recommend remedy for underlying problems
• BLM should issue new policy and training to guide application of lease suspensions to ensure these types of problems do not continue.
• BLM should increase transparency and opportunities for public involvement in lease suspension and monitoring.

America’s public lands are a treasure that we are obligated to safeguard for future generations, and to manage for their sustainable and public benefit. Those are the directives handed down to our federal land agencies.

But for too long the oil and gas industry has operated like the public lands under lease are their estate, not the public’s estate that they have been granted a limited right to develop for public and well as private benefit, and in an orderly and efficient manner. The public lands are not meant to merely be a padding for a land man’s portfolio nor subject to random development at the whenever whim of an absentee driller.

The public lands are an honorable American legacy and we ought to demand that they be stewarded as such. America’s public lands are not a slush fund for speculators or chips for a landman’s leverage. They belong to all Americans, and all Americans deserve the benefit of their prudent management.