Bush's Energy Policy Lives Where Deer and Antelope Play

[DeepModem Mom]

New York Times:


Bush's Energy Policy Lives Where the Deer and the Antelope Play


A herd of 100 pronghorn antelopes were trotting over a ridge here, then meandered to a halt and foraged meditatively a few hundred yards from a natural gas wellhead and its squat companion tanks, filled with the petroleum byproducts of the drilling.

The pronghorns were stragglers in the winter migration of antelopes across the Upper Green River Valley, a landscape that has been tied to this ancient pattern for millenniums and is now being remade by the nation's thirst for clean-burning, environmentally friendly natural gas. Energy companies eager to slake that thirst while prices are high are accelerating the makeover of the longest wildlife migration route in the continental United States.

Whether this harms the wildlife in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem or affects the air or water in the Wind River Mountains is unclear. But it is clear that here in the Upper Green, as the area is called, the Bush administration's energy policies have come to life. The antelopes' migration route and the winter range of thousands of mule deer lie atop an estimated 7 trillion to 10 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — more than 4 percent of the nation's reserves, according to Don J. Likwartz, Wyoming's oil and gas supervisor....


In the past three years, more than 575 wells have been drilled to tap two rich deposits, and at least 1,500 more are likely to follow, said Priscilla Mecham, the senior Interior Department official in the area. Mr. Likwartz says he thinks that figure is low; he said EnCana Oil and Gas (USA), the Canadian company that is the largest leaseholder in the area, and other companies like Ultra Petroleum and Shell Exploration and Production, are seeking to allow drilling at as many as 3,100 more wells, filling in an area already laced with 747 miles of new gas-related dirt roads.



http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/politics/14DRIL.html?pagewanted=all&position=