Feds to Sell Oil and Gas Leases in San Juan County Cultural Areas, Ignoring Pleas from Tribunal Officials and Others
For
the third time since last year, the Bureau of Land Management is auctioning oil
and gas leases on archaeologically rich canyons and mesas in San Juan County,
but this time in the face of opposition from local elected and business
leaders, tribal officials, the National Park Service and the federal
government’s own Advisory Council on Historic Preservation — all saying the BLM
has not adequately reviewed the potential for future energy development to tear
the region’s historic fabric.
Starting
Monday, 19 parcels covering 32,000 acres are to be sold at the BLM’s quarterly
online auction, coming on top of 36 other disputed parcels leased last year in
this same area east of Blanding.
The
San Juan County Commission weighed in Tuesday with a resolution calling on the
BLM to “defer the sale to prevent the degradation of cultural heritage
resources, dark skies, natural resources, visitor experience, water quality,
and air quality in the area,” while other groups, including the Navajo Utah
Commission, are pressuring Utah Gov. Gary Herbert to intervene.
Last
year, the BLM leased 62,000 acres, much of it to an obscure company with no
history in the energy industry, on these lands northwest of Hovenweep National
Monument. Considered a “cultural landscape," it is riven with canyons
teeming with kivas, cliff dwellings, masonry structures, rock art, burial sites
and other remnants of Ancestral Puebloan civilization.
The
BLM has suspended those earlier leases while it conducts further analysis in
response to lawsuits brought by environmental groups. That analysis is limited
to greenhouse gas emissions associated with the leases, even though the suits
are more broadly focused on cumulative impacts.
This
landscape around Alkali Ridge, Tin Cup Mesa and Montezuma Canyon are a
less-scenic version of the more famous Bears Ears region to the west, yet it
contains a lot more known oil and gas deposits and a lot fewer restrictions on
energy development.
Bidding
on drilling rights here have been competitive with parcels fetching between $40
and $90 an acre at last year’s auctions.
The
BLM’s environmental review concluded leasing would have “no adverse effect” on
cultural resources, although they have yet to be fully surveyed and the
proposed leases carry none of the customary stipulations barring surface
disturbance in sensitive places. The BLM’s review said site-specific analysis at
the time of drilling would adequately identify locations for well pads that
won’t harm cultural resources.
That’s
not good enough, according to the opponents, many with an interest, both
spiritual or economic, in the area’s nonenergy resources.
“These
lands, nestled between Bears Ears and Hovenweep national monuments, protect the
layered cultural history that we Utahns hold dear,” Bluff Mayor Ann Leppanen
wrote in a letter last week to Herbert. “We urge you to work with the BLM on a
long-term planning solutions for the area to better balance the multiple uses
that benefit local communities, the Tribes, visitors, business organizations,
and the state.”
The
governor’s office declined an opportunity to comment Friday.
The
BLM plans to lease another nine parcels here at its December auction. After
these sales, oil and gas leases will cover nearly everything from Recapture
Canyon east to the Colorado line, and south of Alkali Ridge to the Navajo
Reservation, according to Landon Newell, staff attorney with the Southern Utah
Wilderness Alliance, an environmental group.
Critics
such as Leppanen fear that once this landscape is covered in leases, it could
soon be overrun with drill rigs, new roads and pipelines, turning this area into
a “single-use landscape.”
Currently,
several old wells dating back to the 1980s and earlier continue to produce
marginal quantities of oil, while others have been abandoned. New drilling
technologies could have better luck turning this chronically underperforming
oil field into a busy place.
While
it would produce lots of revenue, such an outcome may not be in San Juan County
residents’ best interests, according to County Commissioner Willie Grayeyes.
“We
are talking about water, we are talking about culturally sensitive sites‚” he
said at Tuesday’s commission meeting in support of the resolution opposing the
lease sale. He wants to see measures in place that guarantee drilling and oil
production will not harm the environment.
Casting
the sole vote against the resolution, County Commissioner Bruce Adams said
leasing does not necessarily mean the land will get drilled. Opposing lease
sales could deprive Bluff and the county of grants from the Community Impact
Board, on which Adams serves. This board disburses federal mineral revenues to
counties and cities affected by mineral development.
“I
don’t see how the sale puts us at risk,” he said. “It is when the application
to drill comes that we might object to actual drilling because of the
possibility to denigrate cultural sites.”
Critics,
however, argue that leasing is the stage where the BLM can ensure drilling is
done right, but the agency has not done its homework in this case. And it’s not
just left-leaning political leaders asking for a leasing pause.
Repeating
past concerns, the National Park Service has asked the BLM to not lease the 19
parcels, which are between 4.5 and 21 miles from Hovenweep National Monument.
Most are even closer to the BLM-administered Canyons of the Ancients National
Monument in Colorado.
"Despite
the distance from Hovenweep, we believe that oil and gas exploration and
development on these parcels will be detrimental to the visitor experience in
the monument and surrounding lands, and will negatively affect resources important
to Hovenweep," monument officials wrote in their comments to the BLM's
environmental analysis.
In
its response, the BLM said holding back the parcels would be “inconsistent”
with its resource management plan and “contrary” to current agency policy,
largely shaped by President Donald Trump’s “American energy dominance” agenda
that calls for lowering barriers to develop energy on public lands.
In
moving forward with the sale, the BLM is ignoring the recommendations it
solicited from the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation back in
April. That panel concluded leasing would adversely affect cultural sites, yet
the BLM’s analysis of the proposed leases did not acknowledge these impacts or
provide instructions to mitigate them. Before any additional leasing here, the
council recommended, the BLM should complete a “programmatic agreement"
that would consider historic properties.
Such
an agreement sounds a lot like the “master leasing plans” then-Interior
Secretary Sally Jewell initiated a few years ago for energy-rich public lands
near national parks, such as those in eastern San Juan County. The BLM never
got around to assembling a San Juan plan before Jewell’s Trump-appointed
successor Ryan Zinke pulled the plug on the master leasing program, which the
energy industry and its congressional allies had castigated as a bureaucratic
boondoggle.
But
without master leasing plans in place, however, it appears the BLM cannot
guarantee energy development would occur in eastern San Juan County in ways
that are acceptable to Native Americans and historic preservationists. The All
Pueblo Council of Governors, representing 19 tribal groups whose members
descended from the inhabitants of these canyons, is now urging Herbert to stand
up for “careful preservation” and to call on the BLM to scuttle next week’s
sale.
“The area in which these leases are located is in a rich ancestral Puebloan landscape, critical to the ongoing identity of our member Pueblos,” the group’s chairman, E. Paul Torres, wrote in an Aug. 22 letter. “For us, they have an even deeper meaning, as these resources represent our cultural resources gifted to us by our ancestors; which we have relied on and are connected to, even to today.”