Western energy in flap over bird
SARATOGA, Wyo. — Efforts to conserve a struggling species of grouse that ranges across the Western U.S. are having farreaching effects on the region’s energy industry as President Barack Obama’s administration decides whether the bird needs more protection.
Sales of leases on 8.1 million acres of federal oil and gas parcels — an area larger than Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined — are on hold because of worries that drilling could harm greater sage grouse, according to government data.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s delay on the parcels highlights just how much is at stake for an industry that finds its future inextricably intertwined with a bird known primarily for its elaborate mating display.
The grouse’s huge range, covering portions of 11 states and an area more than four times as big as New England, includes vast oil, gas and coal reserves and the best type of windy, open country for developing wind power.
“We’re not real happy about it. It’s not even an endangered species,” said Rick Bailey, who runs an oil and gas lease brokerage, Nevada Leasing Services. He said he’s had hundreds of thousands of acres of potential leases put on hold.
Those parcels are among 5 million acres the Bureau of Land Management has deferred in Nevada. Since 2008, millions more acres have been put on hold across Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, according to data compiled from Bureau of Land Management records and agency offices in the West and Plains.
By comparison, about 26.6 million federal acres were under active oil and gas leases at the end of fiscal 2013 in the seven states with deferrals. That figure is down more than 20 percent since 2008.
While some in the industry are concerned that the Bureau of Land Management’s deferrals are going to dampen or curtail energy development, other developers are starting their own efforts to preserve the sage grouse. Whether that’s enough to avoid protections remains to be seen.
Sage grouse receive frequent comparisons to the Northern spotted owl, another imperiled bird at the center of a fight over logging in the Pacific Northwest.
Croplands, home development, wildfires, and oil and gas drilling have consumed more than half the sage grouse’s habitat over the past century. Grouse numbers are down at least 30 percent since 1985 to no more than 500,000.
In 2010, federal biologists said protections were warranted but didn’t impose them, citing other priorities and a shortage of funds.
The September deadline to either offer protections or decide they’re no longer needed resulted from settlements of lawsuits brought by environmentalists. Whether the sales of leases on the deferred parcels will proceed and drilling will occur could hinge on that decision.
Already, the administration’s timeline to craft conservation plans for the bird is slipping. Federal officials want the 11 sage-grouse states and multiple federal agencies to agree to longterm steps to protect the birds. The effort includes overhauling 99 federal land-use plans.
“It is a Rubik’s Cube of conservation,” said Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Jim Lyons, referring to the 3-D puzzle popular in the 1980s.
Complicating the conservation effort is that nobody knows the approximate number of greater sage grouse. Estimates range from 100,000 to 500,000. One reason the bird is difficult to count is because it spreads across an immense, sparsely populated territory. Also, sage grouse rarely live longer than a year or two.
At the largest proposed wind power project in the U.S. in Saratoga, Wyo., developers are drawing from four years of sage-grouse research to decide where to put service roads and turbines.
Consultants for the 1,000-turbine Chokecherry-Sierra Madre wind farm have been using transmitters to track hundreds of sage grouse.