The long-running battle over development of Western Colorado’s scenic Roan Plateau will be resolved in the next few weeks.
The Roan, a 3,500-foot-tall mesa in Garfield County, is a treasure trove that is estimated to contain 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Since more than half of the plateau is publicly held land, it’s also a potential windfall for Colorado taxpayers, who will share mineral leasing bonus payments and ongoing royalties with the federal government on a 5 0/50 basis.
While some environmental groups would like to totally ban development on the Roan, that’s not a realistic option in view of America’s ravenous appetite for energy. But action in the U.S. Congress — or the lack thereof — in the next few weeks should determine whether the 67,000 acres on the Roan are leased in one fell swoop, as the U.S. Bureau of Land Management advocates, or in a series of more thoughtfully managed phased leases, as sought by Gov. Bill Ritter.
For both economic and environmental reasons, The Post favors Ritter’s plan. We thus support efforts of Sen. Ken Salazar and Rep. Mark Udall, both Colorado Democrats, to write the Ritter plan into law.
Let us stress that we don’t think the BLM plan is a bad one. Crafted after seven years of public hearings and close collaboration with state and local officials, it was heavily influenced by Russ George, who was former Gov. Bill Owens’ director of natural resources. Among other restrictions, the BLM plan would limit drilling operations to no more than 1 percent of the plateau’s surface land at any given time. All land disturbed by such operations would have to be eventually reclaimed and restored.
The BLM plan as shaped by George on behalf of the outgoing Owens administration was a sound beginning. But after considerable prodding, the federal agency agreed to give the new governor and his team 120 days to comment on its plans. Led by the current director of natural resources, Harris Sherman, the Ritter team substantially improved on the BLM plan, offering more protection to taxpayers and the environment alike.
The Ritter plan, as now embraced by Salazar and Udall, would preserve an additional 16,000 acres atop the mesa, shielding a total of 36,000 acres from drilling. It also would require that new leasing proceed in six phases, with drilled land in each phase to be restored before the next could occur.
The phased drilling plan should ultimately produce more cash for federal and state coffers than the BLM’s proposal to lease all the land at once. That’s because the extraction of the Roan’s resources is estimated to take up to 30 years and energy companies wouldn’t pay much in initial leasing bonuses for resources they couldn’t exploit for decades.
Phased development also gives time for improved drilling techniques to exploit the 18 percent of the Roan that is off-limits to current technology under Ritter’s plan without disturbing environmentally sensitive areas.
After seven years of study, the time frame for action is now quite short. The BLM is expected to begin offering leases as soon as Aug. 14, which means it would give the required 60-day notice of such an act by June 14.
Given the Bush administration’s opposition to the Ritter plan, Salazar and Udall are expected to try to attach their plan to a bill that would be immune to a veto, such as a defense appropriations bill. If they succeed, their bill should trump the BLM plan and lead to more measured development of the Roan, to the ultimate benefit of taxpayers and wildlife alike.
