On the range, gas trumps wildlife

At Sand Wash, Utah, a dusty slice of back country 45 miles from the nearest paved road, river-raft guide John Weisheit lectures tourists about the history of the Green River and the wilderness experience that will soon unfold for them.

Climbing into rafts, they float on chocolate waters, following the path of 19th century explorer John Wesley Powell, beneath the cliffs of Desolation Canyon. No car engines or cellphones mar this trip far away from it all.

But soon, Mr. Weisheit says he may chop all wilderness references from his little lecture. They'll ring hollow, he says, if Sand Wash, a onetime crossing for pioneers and cattle, echoes instead with the sounds of diesel engines and drilling rigs exploring for oil and gas.

Wednesday, in the biggest sale of its kind in Utah history, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) offered at auction oil- and gas-exploration leases on more than 360,000 acres of rugged back country - including UT-201, a 120-acre chunk of Green River flood plain that abuts Sand Wash, and another 16,000 acres a few miles away.

Not long ago such remote regions seemed on track to one day become officially protected wilderness areas. Now they're part of a huge debate over the proper use of public lands in the United States. At issue: When does energy security trump wilderness protection?

No one claims the oil and gas from public lands will free the nation from dependence on foreign oil. The amount of oil in the Rocky Mountain West is negligible - less than a year's supply for the nation. But the region's gas could supply the nation for a few years and, by lowering prices, save consumers billions of dollars. So should the US encourage such energy development wherever it's economically viable? Or, in the case of wilderness, does some higher standard apply?

To hear the White House and the oil and gas industry tell it, gaining access to public lands is a key to greater energy self-sufficiency.

"Basically, we've taken large chunks of the country and put it off-limits to any kind of exploration or development," said Vice President Dick Cheney at a town hall meeting in Hot Springs, Ark. "We don't drill off the East Coast, we don't drill off the West Coast.... Large parts of the Rocky Mountain West are off-limits."

Some 29 percent of the Rocky Mountain area's gas reserves are "effectively off limits" because of conditions that limit drilling, estimates a 2003 report done for the US Department of Energy by the National Petroleum Council, an industry lobby group. If such restrictions were removed nationwide, that easier access to public lands could save consumers $300 billion over 20 years, the report says, thanks to lower natural gas prices.

But such figures almost certainly overstate the case, energy analysts and environmentalists counter.

For example, domestic energy production is apparently not being held up by a lack of oil and gas leases. Since 1982, the US has leased or offered for lease 229 million acres of public land for oil and gas development across 12 Western states, according to a new report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington-based environmental organization. That represents nearly 9 of every 10 BLM acres and covers an area bigger than Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona combined.

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