BLM reviewing Bull Mountain EA

150 wells in six years

The Bureau of Land Management is moving toward approval of a Master Development Plan (MDP) for natural gas production in the nearly 20,000-acre Bull Mountain Unit in the northwest corner of Gunnison County.

An Environmental Assessment (EA) for the MDP, released in late March, aims to become an “umbrella” environmental analysis for the unit that would guide all other environmental reviews related to gas development in the area.
Starting in 2000, natural gas developer SG Interests began accumulating gas leases in the headwaters of the North Fork and today owns and operates 16 wells on 13 pads in the area, according to the BLM. Together with Gunnison Energy Corporation, which is the other gas producer in the North Fork, SG Interests has also developed nearly 17 miles of pipeline to get its product to market.
The 172-page preliminary EA offers up a proposed action to allow SG Interests to drill a total of 146 gas wells and four water disposal wells on 36 new well pads and five existing well pads on private property across the Bull Mountain Unit. Gas wells will be evenly distributed between shale gas formations and coal bed formations, the EA says.
The EA doesn’t raise any serious concerns with the impacts of the development and proposes granting SG Interests the MDP they had requested of the BLM. Even the recommended alternative would offer an equal amount of land up to development with minor changes to the locations of the operation. A no action alternative is also offered, as is standard for federally proposed actions.
Instead, the assessment tries to highlight the relatively limited impact of the MDP. It says, to install a 1.4-acre well pad, developers will need to disturb 3.5 acres. Including construction of the roads, the BLM is estimating 287 acres of the 20,000-acre unit will be disturbed to install the entire infrastructure related to the development. Development and the initial round of drilling are scheduled for six years. As many as 27 wells could be drilled per year until the unit is fully developed, the EA says.
According to the BLM, “The objective of unitization [and subsequent Master Development Plan] is to proceed with a program that will adequately and timely explore and develop all committed lands within the unit area without regard to internal ownership boundaries . . . By effectively eliminating internal property boundaries within the unit area, unitization permits the most efficient and cost effective means of developing the underlying oil and gas resources.”
The 19,645-acre surface of the Bull Mountain Unit is 96 percent privately owned. With those surface owners, including a number of ranchers, SG Interests has agreements in place to provide compensation for the use of their land.
At the same time, the assessment points out that air pollution will be increased, if locally, during the development phase and then continue, to a lesser degree, for the decades-long life of the wells, along with the destruction of vegetation and the other impacts that go along with development of any kind. And according to the EA, development “may adversely impact [bald eagle and northern goshawk] individuals, but is not likely to result in a loss of viability on the planning area, nor cause a trend to federal listing or a loss of species viability range-wide.”
But the greatest impact of the development, according to the EA, might be to the mule deer, elk and other large animals that use large portions of the Bull Mountain Unit to winter, especially in extreme weather. Those concerns were addressed by the Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife and the BLM suggests that the elk herds are larger than they’ve historically been and Mule Deer “have shown considerable accustomization to human activities within the area,” the EA says.
“However, it is well-documented that deer stress levels, and thus overall fitness, are compromised when mule deer utilize habitats near and within areas of major natural gas development,” it goes on to say. “At this time, the level of natural gas development in the Unit is not considered to be major.”
However, critics of development in the North Fork would say 150 wells on 20,000 acres is enough to impact the local big game populations and the High Country Citizens’ Alliance said as much in a letter to the BLM asking that it reconsider some of what is being offered up to SG Interests because it is largely based on a Resource Management Plan from 1989. By going through the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process, HCCA public lands director Matt Reed hopes the proposal will be subject to a “more comprehensive and detailed analysis of the resource concerns,” namely those related to big game habitat.
According to the EA, however, leasing subsurface rights to oil and gas companies is necessary to fulfill the call to “develop domestic natural gas reserves for supply and economic stability,” emphasized in the Energy Policy At of 2005. That Act also includes language that exempts hydraulic fracturing fluids and their “propping agents,” commonly used in natural gas production, from the regulations for “underground injection,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Most federal applications for a permit to drill submitted in the five years after the MDP is approved would be given a “streamlined NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] analysis based on the programmatic impact evaluation contained in this MDP,” which was also a provision granted by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
SG Interests has to develop at least two producing wells every year in order to maintain the Bull Mountain Unit designation with the BLM. The company has been working through the County’s planning process to get a permit for a pad that would eventually have five separate wells on private land in the area northwest of Paonia Reservoir. If the permit is approved, the company could start drilling this summer.
The planning commission will hold a public hearing for that permit application Friday, May 4.