The Bureau of Land Management has given Conoco Inc.
the go-ahead to drill for oil in southern Utah’s new Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Agency officials say finding
oil is a long shot, and Conoco will probably abandon the area.
Environmentalists retort that the BLM is playing dangerous games
with a national jewel.
Earlier this month, the
BLM approved Conoco’s application to drill in Reese Canyon, at the
southern end of the monument. “It was a no-brainer,” says BLM
spokesman Don Banks. The agency had leased the land to Conoco
before the monument was created, he says, and one test well in an
area already affected by previous oil drilling would do no
harm.
“There’s been 49 dusters (non-producing
wells) in the monument over the last four decades,” he says. “If
history is a guide, the Reese Canyon well will be duster number
50,” he says.
Company spokesman John Bennitt says
Conoco won’t drill in Reese Canyon until it sees the results of a
test well on nearby school trust lands. These results are at least
a month away, he says (HCN, 9/1/97).
This should
give environmentalists time to appeal the BLM’s decision, says
Scott Groene of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. His group
has joined The Wilderness Society and others in filing an appeal
with the Interior Board of Land Appeals to stop Conoco until the
BLM finishes its management plan for the monument in
1999.
“Rather than making an active management
decision, the BLM has decided it’s going to throw the dice,” says
Groene. “You shouldn’t be gambling with national monuments. You
should be trying to protect them.”
Says Don
Banks, “Our friends in the environmental community are looking for
something we cannot offer at this time: a guarantee that there will
be no oil and gas exploration in the monument, ever.” Banks says
there are 89 oil and gas leases covering 140,000 acres in the
monument. All were signed before President Clinton created the
monument last year.
“It’s naive not to expect
some rough air over this situation in the first couple of years,”
says Banks. “When the monument came in, it came in on top of a
layer of existing leases. These lands come with past histories.”
*Greg Hanscom
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The drilling proceeds.
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