Gas bonanza shakes dust from Western towns
Landscape painter Alfred Jacob Miller set up his easel on the shore of Fremont Lake 168 years ago and rendered one of the most famous romantic portraits ever made of the wild American West. Today, in the small ranching and tourist community that grew up around the venerated lake, motel rooms in Pinedale are sold out, but not from traditional tourists exploring the haunting Wind River range.
The influx stems from an unprecedented invasion of oil-patch "roughnecks" creating a round-the-clock beehive of drilling rig crews, pipe layers, roadbuilders, and truck fleets.
Indeed, tiny Pinedale represents ground zero in one of the biggest natural-gas booms in the postwar era. Driven by high energy prices and looser government regulations, it is transforming many of the small towns here along the rumpled spine of the Rockies - creating thousands of lucrative jobs, pouring money into local treasuries, and, as always happens with sudden growth, producing new problems ranging from traffic to drug use.
"The US national energy policy is being played out on an epic scale in our backyard," says Ward Wise, the city manager whose folksy municipal attire is a pair of jeans, denim jacket, hiking boots, and a leather cowboy hat. "All of a sudden, our little rural town has come face to face with the hurricane force of the global energy market."
In many ways, the continuous drilling of new wells outside Pinedale is just one example of an energy boom being played out across the American West. Oil and gas prices at record highs (until adjusted for inflation) and the opening of more public lands to development have brought small wildcatters out of retirement and attracted the usual assortment of Big Oil interests.
In just the past year alone, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has approved 5,700 new drilling permits in Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana - an increase of about 62 percent over the previous year.
But perhaps nowhere is the bonanza more evident, and the financial and social impacts more deeply felt, than here in Pinedale (population 1,400) the Sublette Countyseat. It currently has the second-lowest unemployment rate in the country and is a major reason why Wyoming is enjoying a massive budget surplus.
As billions of dollars worth of gas is being extracted annually, output is expected to grow exponentially. At the current going rate of $5.75 per thousand cubic feet of gas, the spoils are the equivalent of oil companies planning to exploit a large untapped reserve of crude and counting on profitability at $30 a barrel yet to yield $90 a barrel.
Already, some 3,000 wells reach deep into the Jonah Gas Field and Pinedale Anticline - yielding a billion cubic feet of gas a day - but three times that many wells are projected as part of a bonanza that geologists believe could last 40 years. The only thing that could cause a downturn, experts say, is a dramatic fall in gas prices.
"For the first time ever in Pinedale, good-paying jobs are available year round," says Janet Montgomery, the county assessor who has tracked the tsunami of tax revenue pouring in, most of it going to the local school district. She says it's not uncommon for gas field workers to earn $60,000 or more a year.
