New resource management plans (RMPs) for five of the US Bureau of Land Management’s six Utah field offices received final approval Oct. 31. The sixth is being reviewed at the US Department of the Interior.
State BLM officials said the agency wants to change the way it manages its Utah acreage. Area oil and gas associations are welcoming the new plans.
Environmental organizations, meanwhile, were more concerned about a lease sale they expected BLM to announce Nov. 4. They believed it would include areas that they said BLM previously had declared “wilderness caliber landscapes.”
“This has been a truly collaborative effort in balanced stewardship for the future,” said Selma Sierra, Utah State BLM director. “We are pleased to have the plans completed and look forward to moving into the implementation phase of the planning process.”
Sierra said the new plans will help the agency meet challenges that have emerged since the previous RMPs were written about 25 years ago. Each new plan took about 6 years to complete, she indicated.
Some stricter controls
The agency tried to balance environmental protection with energy resource development, state BLM officials said. In the new plans, 53% of the acres open to leasing are subject to stricter environmental controls, and 18% of the lands within the planning areas aren’t available at all.
BLM also wants to minimize the oil and gas production footprint on public land by using innovative methods such as directional drilling, well placement, sound muffling, and other best management practices.
Kathleen Sgamma, government affairs director for the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States, said Utah’s BLM staff found it difficult to balance often competing interests and respond to nearly 220,000 public comments and 87 formal protests.
Oil and gas production in Utah occupies less than 1% of public land there, she noted. With current technology and industry practices, producers can develop energy resources now, and reclaim the land to its original condition afterward, she said.
Small, temporary impacts
“We hope BLM took into account the small and temporary impacts of natural gas development and recognized that energy production and other uses of public lands in Utah can and do coexist,” Sgamma said.
Area environmental groups are more concerned with what they say will be a move by BLM to offer oil and gas leases in the Nine-Mile Canyon region of eastern Utah on Dec. 19.
“What makes this action so deplorable is that BLM itself determined these areas to be wilderness-quality lands,” said Stephen Bloch, conservation director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
SUWA said the tracts that BLM plans to offer are dominated by acreage that the agency determined had wilderness character after conducting inventories during 1996-99 and 2001-07. They largely are part of land proposed for wilderness designation in legislation introduced during the 110th Congress, the organization said.
