Drilling method pumps up floods of conflict

Beneath the desolate beauty of Wyoming's Red Desert lie rock-bound resources that could go a long way toward meeting America's burgeoning demand for natural gas.

But the potential energy supplies are also unleashing floodwaters of controversy on the open range.

At issue is a method of releasing methane - a form of natural gas - from coal beds where it is trapped. In the process, vast quantities of water are also extracted, threatening the livelihood of many ranchers.

The battle here has implications that reach far beyond this unusual landscape. It could help determine whether drilling rigs increasingly sprout up in landscapes as diverse as New Mexican mesas, Midwest prairies, and Pennsylvania hills.

"It's going to happen around the world," predicts Walter Merschat, president of Scientific Geochemical Services in Casper, Wyo. "I think any place there's coal, there's a potential for extracting methane."

In fact, while the prospect of drilling for oil in Alaska has become a focal point of debate over President Bush's national energy strategy, his plan also seeks to encourage so-called coal-bed methane drilling in the lower 48 states. This would disturb more acres of land near more people than would drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

With or without encouragement from Washington, experts say the new drilling technique could unlock a vast resource at a time when new US power plants have increasingly relied on natural gas for fuel.

The extraction method, developed since the late 1980s, has boomed in the past few years in northeastern Wyoming's Powder River Basin, where almost 11,000 wells have been drilled during the past two years.

The Red Desert is part of the Green River Basin, a region in southwestern Wyoming that, by itself, may hold enough coal-bed methane to supply the nation with a decade's worth of natural gas - 314 trillion cubic feet.

The US Bureau of Land Management, which owns key mineral rights here, expects the region to become America's major gas-producing region by 2015. The agency plans to permit 4,000 methane wells near Rawlins, on the area's eastern edge.

But critics say the rich energy supplies come at a large cost to the land and many who live on it.

"It's going to be tragic - all the erosion, the weeds, the pipelines," says Bernie Barlow, whose family has raised cattle since 1927 in the steep hills of the Powder River Breaks. Like many ranchers, Ms. Barlow doesn't own the mineral rights underfoot.

Where coal-bed methane is developed, it introduces new miles of roads, wires, and pipelines into an empty landscape. It also generates large amounts of water.

The reason: To get methane out of the coal, drillers first pump out water that is trapped in the rock. This reduces the pressure and allows the gas to percolate out, just as popping the top on a can of soda reduces the pressure and releases the carbonation. A great deal of water in a desert is not necessarily a good thing, since it has to be disposed of and may be high in salts.

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