The US Bureau of Land Management issued final environmental impact statements on Apr. 30 that govern coalbed methane drilling on federal lands in the Powder River basin in eastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana.
This frees the BLM to begin issuing permits to drill in both states unless environmental groups, as threatened, convince a judge to stay the decisions.
BLM's Wyoming office has received requests for 1,000 CBM drilling permits and hopes to issue 3,000 permits/year.
Operators drilled 4,502 wells in 2000 and 4,232 in 2001 and would like to drill 4,500-5,000 wells/year. This would seem to require issuance of 6,400-7,200 permits/year because 30% of the 31,000 permits issued since 1986 have expired without drilling. Permits are only valid for 1 year.
Since 63% of Powder River CBM minerals are on federal land, the BLM would need to issue 4,000-4,500 permits/year at some point to keep development going at the 2000-2001 rate of production growth. Last year's production only increased 29% to 327 bcf because low Rocky Mountain gas prices prompted 2,560 CBM wells.
Powder River basin CBM was again the largest gas field in Wyoming, accounting for 18.7% of state gas production, said Don Likwartz, state oil and gas supervisor. The CBM rig count was 37 in early May compared with 90 in 2001.
