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'Mitigation office' aims to offset harm from Wyoming drilling
APRIL REESE, LAND LETTER, 08/03/06
Photo by April Reese
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PINEDALE, Wyo. -- Towering above bare dirt well pads cleared from among the sage brush here, 15 drilling rigs work to bore new wells into one of the richest reserves of natural gas in the nation.
The Jonah field, which just became a hotbed of activity about seven years ago after new drilling techniques gave energy companies access to the tight sand formations lying deep below the surface, holds about 13 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Above ground, the field is also in the midst of one of the finest expanses of sagebrush in the West, an ecosystem that supports sage grouse, pronghorn, mule deer and other species.
Past drilling has disturbed about 4,000 acres in the 30,000-acre complex, shrinking and fragmenting important habitat, and with about 3,100 new wells on the horizon under a plan approved in March by the Bureau of Land Management, officials expect another 14,000 acres of surface disturbance. But this time, land managers are hoping to minimize the damage by mitigating the environmental effects of drilling, primarily by improving or conserving comparable habitat elsewhere in the Upper Green River Basin.
Where and how that is done will be up to the newly created Jonah Interagency Mitigation and Reclamation Office. In an unusual move, the BLM's record of decision on the new development blueprint, called the Jonah Infill Drilling Project, codified an agreement with EnCana Oil and Gas USA, which owns most of the leases on the Jonah field, that calls for the company to commit $24.5 million to fund mitigation projects and pay for a special office to oversee them.
The mitigation office, which opened its doors in May, will measure the effects on the Jonah field and figure out how to offset the damage, said Mike Stiewig, project coordinator for the office.
"The office has a two-fold mission: to manage on-site monitoring and off-site mitigation. In a nutshell, that's the essence of our existence," said Stiewig, a BLM employee.
Biologist Dan Stroud, one of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department's representatives on the office's small staff, said the intensity of development in the Jonah field, where officials recently approved well spacing of 10 acres, requires an organized, systematic mitigation effort.
"Habitat function [on the Jonah field] is basically in the red, if you will, particularly for pronghorn and sage grouse," Stroud said.
Energy companies are required to reclaim disturbed sites, but EnCana's off-site mitigation effort is voluntary, Stroud said. About $8 million of the company's mitigation coffers will fund the office, and $16.5 million will go toward projects, he said.
While the office will largely focus on projects outside the Jonah field boundaries but within the same greater sage brush ecosystem, it will also oversee some mitigation efforts within the development zone. The office received the first round of proposals for projects in June, ranging from establishing a conservation easement on a cattle ranch to drilling water wells to help support wildlife. The office will decide which projects to fund by the end of this month.
Stroud hopes the office can set an example for other areas in the West.
"We hope to not only sustain population levels [but] even increase them," he said.
Randy Teeuwen, a spokesman for EnCana, said the company's investment in mitigation is unique.
"We're going to have 14,000 acres of disturbance," Teeuwen said. "After everything's all over, we want to leave the Jonah field and the surrounding area with a net positive impact."
The new office will also monitor EnCana's activities in the Jonah field to make sure the company is complying with federal and state regulations, Teeuwen added.
Photo by April Reese
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'Avoidance is the best mitigation'
Steve Belinda, a former BLM biologist who quit his federal job in February to become the policy initiative director for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a coalition of conservation and hunting and fishing groups, commended the agencies and Encana for taking action to mitigate the damage from development, but said there should be more emphasis on avoiding such extensive impacts in the first place.
"I think avoidance is the best mitigation," Belinda said.
And trying to replace what has been lost will be difficult without establishing clear measures for how to value the importance of habitat both on and off the field to ensure an equal trade, Belinda added.
"The thing about mitigation is it's user-defined," he said. "There's a lot of confusion about mitigation that needs to be cleared up."
Stroud said that for the next round of projects, the office intends to design more projects itself and come up with clear parameters for what types of projects are most needed and how each project will contribute to offsetting the effects of development. The office is in the process of summing up the cumulative effects of development, he said.
"In the future, we'd like to ... better define what we're looking for for mitigation," Stroud said.
Teeuwen said the gas under the Jonah field is in an unusually small area, and that wells need to be spaced close together to fully access the resource. That, in turn, requires new ways of thinking about mitigation, he said.
"[This mitigation effort] is completely tied to the unique resource that's there," Teeuwen said. "You have a lot of gas in a small footprint."
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