IIBMS – Gas or Grous
Case – 3 IIBMS – Gas or Grouse IIBMS – Gas or Grouse The Pinedale Mesa (sometime called the Pinedale Anticline) is a 40-mile-long mesa extending north and south along the eastern side of Wyoming’s Green River Basin, an area that is famous as the gateway to the hunting, fishing, and hiking treasures of the Bridger-Teton wilderness. The city of Pinedale sits below the mesa, a short distance from its northern end, surrounded by hundreds of recently drilled wells ceaselessly pumping natural gas from the vast pockets that are buried underneath the long mesa. Questar Corporation, an energy company with assets valued at about $4 billion, is the main developer of the gas wells around the city and up on the mesa overlooking the city. Occasionally elk, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, and other wildlife, including the imperiled greater sage grouse, descend from their habitats atop the mesa and gingerly make their way around and between the Questar wells around Pinedale. Not surprisingly, environmentalists are at war with Questar, whose expanding operations are increasingly encroaching on the wildlife habitat that lies atop the mesa. Yet the mesa is a desperately needed resource that provides the nation with a clean and cheap source of energy. Headquartered in Salt Like City, Questar corporation drilled its first successful test well on the pinedale Mesa in 1998. Extracting the gas under the mesa was not feasible earlier because the gas was trapped in tightly packed sandstone that prevented it from flowing to the wills and no one knew how to get it out. it was not until the mid-1990s that the industry developed techniques for fracturing the sandstone and freeing the gas. Full-scale drilling had to await the completion of an environmental impact statement, which the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finished in mid-2000 when it approved drilling up to 900 wells on federal lands sitting on top of the Pinedale Mesa. By the beginning of 2004, Questar had drilled 76 wells on the 14,800 acres it leased from the federal government and the Wyoming state government and had plans to eventually drill at least 400 more wells. Energy experts welcome the new supply of natural gas, which, because of its simple molecular structure (CH4), burns much more cleanly than any other fossil fuel such as coal, diesel oil, or gasoline. Moreover, because natural gas in extracted in the United States, its use reduced U.S. reliance on foreign energy supplies. Businesses in and around Pinedale also welcomed the drilling activity, which brought numerous benefits, including jobs, increased tax revenues, and a booming local economy. Wyoming’s state government likewise supported the activity since 60 percent of the state budget is based on royalties the state receives from coal, gas, and oil operations. Questar’s wells on the mesa averaged 13,000 feet deep and cost $3.6 million each, depending on the amount of fracturing that had to be done.1 Drilling a well typically required clearing and leveling a 2- to 4- acre “pad” to support the drilling rig and other equipment. One or two wells could be drilled at each pad. Access road had to be run to the pad, and the well had to be connected to a network of pipes that drew the gas from the wells and carried it to where it could be stored and distributed. Each well produced waste liquids that had to be stored in tanks at the pad and periodically hauled away on tanker trucks. The BLM, however, imposed several restrictions on Questar’s operations on the mesa. Large areas of the mesa provide habitat for mule deer, pronghorn sheep, sage grouse, and other species, and the BLM imposed drilling rules that were designed to protect the wildlife species living on the mesa. Chief among these was the sage grouse. The sage grouse is a colorful bird that today survives only in scattered pocket in 11 states. The grouse, which lives at elevations of 4,000 to 9,000 feet and is dependent on increasingly rare old-growth sagebrush for food and to screen itself from predators, is extremely sensitive to human activity. Houses, telephone poles, or fences can draw hawks and ravens, which prey on the ground-nesting grouse. It is estimated that 200 years ago the birds-known for their distinctive spring “strutting” mating dance-numbered 2 million and were common across the western United States. By the 1970s, their numbers had fallen to about 400,000. a study completed in June 2004 by the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies concluded that there were only between 140,000 and 250,000 of the birds left and that “we are not optimistic about the future.” The dramatic decline on their number was blamed primarily on the destruction of 50 percent of their sage brush nesting and mating grounds (called leks), which in turn was blamed on livestock grazing, new home construction, fires, and the expanding acreage being given over to gas drilling and other mining activities. Biologists believe that if its sagebrush habitats are not protected, the bird will be so reduced in number by 2050 that it will never recover. According to Pat Deibert, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, “they need large stands of unbroken sagebrush” and anything that breaks up those stands such as roads, pipelines, or houses, effects them.2 In order to protect the sage grouse, whose last robust population had nested for thousands of years on the ideal sagebrush fields up on the mesa, the BLM required that Questar’s roads, wells, and other structures had to be located a quarter mile or more from grouse breeding grounds, and at least 2 miles from nesting areas during breeding season. Some studies, however, conclude that these protections were not sufficient to arrest the decline in the grouse population. As wells proliferated in the area, they were increasingly taking up land on which the grouse foraged and nested and were disturbing the sensitive birds. Conservationists said that the BLM should increase the quarter-mile buffer area around the grouse breeding
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