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Wilderness vs. Energy Exploration in the 'Thrust Belt' |
By Tom Kenworthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 25, 1997; Page A01
The Washington Post
CHOTEAU, Mont. Approached from the East, the place Montanans call the Rocky Mountain Front looms into view as a towering barrier reef of limestone cliffs, their serrated peaks arcing toward the sunrise.
This is a landscape where great natural forces collide. Shaped by a titanic pileup of rock layers deep beneath Earth's surface some 60 million years ago, this region is where the Great Plains slam to a screeching halt against the mighty shoulder of the Rockies.
The intersection of mountain and grassland produces a biological mixing zone so rich that the 100-mile-long Front is often called America's Serengeti, a tribute to the great herds of elk and bighorn sheep and the grizzly bears, which still roam the prairie as they did when Lewis and Clark navigated up the Missouri River nearly 200 years ago.
For the past two decades, the Rocky Mountain Front has been the scene of another great collision, this one between powerful economic and social forces with very different views of its riches and future. Within a few weeks, that future course will be set -- for at least 10 years and perhaps far longer -- when officials from the U.S. Forest Service determine how much oil and gas drilling will be permitted in the "thrust belt" underlying Lewis and Clark National Forest.
"It is a significant crossroads," said Gloria Flora, the Lewis and Clark forest supervisor who will make the call on oil and gas development in the forest's nearly 2 million acres. "These public lands are truly symbolic of our American heritage. . . . This is a remnant of the intact ecosystem that America was."
This part of the Rocky Mountain Front, extending south from Glacier National Park almost to Montana's capital city of Helena, serves as the eastern gateway to what is arguably the most significant wilderness complex in the lower 48 states. Together, the Great Bear, Bob Marshall and Scapegoat wilderness areas protect about 2 million acres of prime habitat for all the dominant creatures of the western mountains. Without sanctuary in the "Bob," for example, the grizzly, already threatened, would be far more imperiled.
Montana residents long have recognized the unique qualities of this region. As early as 1913 they established a game preserve to protect elk, and other large sanctuaries have been added since. Private conservation groups such as the Nature Conservancy and the Boone and Crockett Club also have preserved big chunks of land.
But, important as the federal wilderness complex is, its boundaries were determined more by the exigencies of politics than the requirements of biology.
Many of the mammals that thrive within it also depend at various times on the lands to the east, the Front and the threshold of the plains, which are not protected by wilderness designation. In late autumn and winter, for example, when the chinook winds howl down the mountainsides and scour the snow from the grasslands, elk and other hoofed animals follow.
In spring and summer, grizzly migrate down through the canyons formed by the Sun and Teton rivers to forage on the plains. Of the large mammals that were here when white settlers first arrived, only the bison is missing.
"This place is unique," Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional Supervisor Mike Aderhold said, still awed that he can see plains species like pronghorn antelope and alpine species like mountain goats living within only a couple of miles of one another. "It falls within the top 1 percent of wildlife and wild land in the United States."
But it is unique for another reason as well. Ten thousand feet and more below the surface, in great pockets and folds created by the upward thrusting of sheets of rock now stacked like giant dominoes, lies what the petroleum industry estimates is 3.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. To the north, across the border with Canada, similar geologic formations are yielding a torrent of gas -- nearly half a billion cubic feet a day from one field alone -- much of it bound for the United States and its insatiable hydrocarbon appetite.
"Everything they have in Alberta that gives them these huge gas fields is in Montana," said Bob Schalla, exploration manager for Equitable Resources Energy Co. in Billings, Mont.
The question, now being decided in Lewis and Clark National Forest headquarters in Great Falls, Mont., is how to balance the need to explore the potential gas fields against the strong public desire to protect the natural wonders of the Front. Is a few months' supply of gas for the nation worth whatever risk is involved in large-scale gas development? And how much risk to the environment would there be from drilling and its associated roads, pipelines and processing plants?
A year ago, national forest supervisor Flora and the interagency team assigned to satisfy a law passed by Congress in 1987 made a preliminary recommendation about energy development in Lewis and Clark. Their "preferred alternative," contained in a draft environmental impact statement, both infuriated the petroleum industry and worried the conservation community.
The Lewis and Clark National Forest staff's draft plan -- a decision is due within weeks -- would allow some leasing, with constraints such as seasonal restrictions to protect wildlife, along existing road rights-of-way in three small areas along the Front. In addition, the plan would permit drilling for gas located under a one-mile strip on the forest's eastern boundary, provided the drilling is done on an angle from beyond the forest's border. Large areas of the forest are deemed "suitable" for exploration, but no leasing would be allowed until the next major review at least 10 years hence.
To the energy industry, what the team has proposed is the functional equivalent of putting the entire forest off-limits, despite improvements in drilling techniques that offer considerable protection for the environment and despite the billions of dollars of royalties and fees that gas production would bring to the state and to local communities.
Drilling in the thrust belt, the energy industry says, is expensive and technically daunting, hardly worth it in the small, restricted areas that would be allowed under the forest team's plan. Nor can a company directionally drill from a mile away, given the subsurface jumble of rock plates that makes drill bits wander off course.
"It's basically going to prohibit any reasonable access to surface areas," said Walt Maguire, a spokesman for Chevron Corp., a big player in early efforts to exploit the region's natural gas resources. "Their goal is to lock up the area for as long as they can."
The environmental community, however, is hardly trumpeting victory.
Environmental groups, joined by outfitters and others who make their living off the hunting, fishing and other recreational opportunities, want it all. Otherwise, they say, future forest managers with less of a conservation ethic could open up large portions to development.
"This is just the wrong place," said John Gatchell, conservation director for the Montana Wilderness Association. "It's not as reckless as previous decisions, but it is still a long way short of actually conserving this wild land."
Should the entire Front be administratively withdrawn from energy exploration?
"That's it, period," replies Dan Bennett, a wilderness advocate from Great Falls. "They have no business being here."
Chuck Blixrud, a native of the Front region who, with his wife, Sharon, has run a guest ranch and outfitting business along the Teton River for nearly 40 years, agrees. "You've lived in this country all your life, you'd like it left alone," he said. Blixrud and others fret that the forest team's plan, by permitting waivers and exceptions to its restrictive drilling rules, will allow the industry to get a foothold that inevitably will expand into major production.
Follow the Teton some 20 miles to the east, however, and you encounter Bert Guthrie and an entirely different point of view. The son of A.B. Guthrie Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Way West," "The Big Sky" and other historical western novels, Bert Guthrie enjoys a measure of local renown for his intransigent hostility to federal and state land and wildlife managers.
A grandson of Norwegian immigrants who homesteaded this harsh country in 1895, Guthrie raises sheep and spring wheat on several thousand acres near here. He is a strong believer in opening up the Front to energy development and believes that the Forest Service, environmentalists and outfitters trying to preserve "their franchise" have conspired to maintain it as a "playground" overstocked with elk and bear that eat the crops and livestock of farmers and ranchers who live nearby.
From his ranch house, Guthrie can see some of the huge blocks of land bought by the state and conservation groups for wildlife preserves. Taking that land out of production only raises his taxes, says Guthrie, and encourages grizzlies to wander down from the mountains and slaughter his sheep, as they have done every year but one since 1985.
"Environmentalists want to go up there and bird-watch and stargaze to the exclusion of every other activity," said Guthrie. "I think the policy ought to be that oil and gas development should be allowed."
Guthrie represents a significant slice of public opinion in the ranching community near the Front, but he senses that the tide is running against him. Some 80 percent of those who commented on the forest team's drilling plan opposed all oil and gas development.
And to the north, some of the big energy companies that have held leases since the Reagan administration in an area of the forest called Badger-Two Medicine appear to be tiring of the protracted fight. In an area that is sacred to the Blackfeet Indians, and adjacent to Glacier National Park, those leases have been enormously controversial, and actual drilling has been blocked by the Clinton administration.
Now, oil companies have opened up talks with the Interior Department in an effort to pull out and cut their losses. Chevron, for one, is looking to abandon Badger-Two Medicine if it can get bidding credits elsewhere equal to the roughly $8 million it has invested in the region.
The Lewis and Clark National Forest's preliminary oil and gas development plan would allow no new leases in Badger-Two Medicine. Given the industry's disgust with the limited leasing allowed elsewhere in the forest, supervisor Flora is asked, why not simply withdraw the entire Front from energy development?
"That," she says with an intriguing smile, "is a very good question."
Copyright 1997 The Washington Post