Ranchers Bristle as Gas Wells Loom on the Range
By BLAINE HARDEN and DOUGLAS JEHL
ILLETTE, Wyo. — As it runs through Orin Edwards's ranch, the Belle Fourche River bubbles like Champagne. The bubbles can burn. They are methane, also called natural gas, the fuel that heats 59 million American homes. Mr. Edwards noticed the bubbles two years ago, after gas wells were drilled on his land. The company that drilled the wells denies responsibility for the flammable river.
An hour's drive west, the artesian well on Roland and Beverly Landrey's ranch has failed. After producing 50 gallons a minute for 34 years, the well, the ranch's only source of water, stopped flowing in September. A well digger who examined it blames energy companies drilling for gas nearby, but the companies dispute that. So the couple — he is 83 and ailing; she describes herself as "no spring chicken" — hauls water in gallon jugs and drives 30 miles to town weekly to wash clothes and bathe.
Dave Bullach, a welder who lives near Gillette, couldn't take it anymore. For two sleep-deprived years, he endured the incessant yowl of a methane compressor, a giant pump that squeezes methane into an underground pipeline. There are thousands of these screaming machines in Wyoming, where neither state nor federal law regulates their noise. Mr. Bullach stormed out of his house at midnight last year with a rifle and shot at the compressor until a sheriff's deputy hauled him off to jail.
This is the cantankerous world of energy extraction in the Rocky Mountain West, where natural gas is abundant and cheap to remove, and where the Bush administration, in its aggressive push to increase domestic energy production, is on the brink of approving the largest-ever gas-drilling project on federal land. Here in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, the Bureau of Land Management says that early next year it will give final approval to the drilling of 39,000 wells on eight million acres.
With natural gas consumption expected to soar in the next two decades, no one questions the need for new sources of this clean-burning fossil fuel. What alarms ranchers, along with environmental groups, is the hugely disruptive process of getting gas out of all those wells.
It is a 15-year-old drilling technique called coal-bed methane extraction, which can turn ranches and prairies into sprawling industrial zones, laced with wells, access roads, power lines, compressor stations and wastewater pits.
Stoking local outrage, the split nature of land ownership in much of the West, with mineral rights owned separately from surface rights, allows energy companies to operate on ranchers' land without their consent. Environmentalists also doubt whether energy companies can actually remove — in a way that is profitable and ecologically sound — the enormous amounts of methane that federal experts say is available in Western coal seams.
"Ranchers have never truly thought much of tree-hugging environmentalists," said John Dewey, 76, who owns a small cattle ranch outside Sheridan, Wyo. "But with these methane boys on our land, we are starting to see these environmentalists as conservationists who want to help us preserve land for our kids."
Most natural gas in the Rocky Mountain West lies fairly close to the surface, in coal seams, trapped under huge aquifers. To get to the gas, water is pumped out, peppering the landscape with large numbers of relatively cheap and shallow wells.
Oddly, in an arid region prone to persistent drought, the primary waste product — and environmental threat — of extracting coal-bed methane is water, in phenomenal amounts. In the Powder River Basin, for example, drillers are expected to pump out 3.2 million acre-feet of water — as much as New York City uses in two and a half years.
It is primarily this immense draining of aquifers by thousands of wells that makes drilling for coal-bed methane so environmentally intrusive. Conventional gas wells are usually much deeper and more expensive to dig, and do not drain huge quantities of groundwater.
