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Energy boom gives wildlife little room
Growth of all kinds in Sublette County threatens Jackson Hole mule deer, pronghorn herds.

By Rebecca Huntington

As if on cue, a mule deer doe and fawn dart across Highway 191 from one snow-dusted patch of sagebrush to another as Bernie Holz nears Trappers Point.

On this gray November morning, the snow-covered bluff of dull, brown sagebrush above the Green River appears unremarkable. A historical marker notes that fur trappers rendezvoused here in the 1800s. The knoll overlooks the highway and a cement underpass for cattle, which is sometimes used by mule deer but not by wary pronghorn.

This plain-looking piece of ground about an hour's drive south of Jackson in Sublette County is Wyoming's most notorious wildlife crossing. Here the topography funnels migrating deer and pronghorn between the Green and New Fork rivers. The highway and a rural subdivision have further pinched the naturally constricted corridor to a half-mile swath.

Severing the corridor could cut off pronghorn that move between summer ranges in Grand Teton National Park to winter ranges south of Pinedale. Mule deer that summer in four mountain ranges ­ the Gros Ventre, Snake River, Salt River and Wyoming ­ also pass through here to reach the wintering grounds that include the Pinedale Mesa.

"From a wildlife conservation standpoint, this is the hill you die on," said Holz, wildlife supervisor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Jackson-Pinedale Region. Holz says this matter-of-factly, his calm, soft-spoken manner belying his firm position.

During a tour around Pinedale earlier this month, Holz pointed out numerous migration corridors and winter ranges, which provide refuge and forage to deer and pronghorn, including some that summer around Jackson Hole. Wildlife officials are struggling to preserve these critical zones in the face of booming oil and gas development, sprawling rural subdivisions, population growth and increasing highway traffic.

Despite its notoriety as a lifeblood for wildlife, Trappers Point is not yet off limits to oil and gas drilling ­ the most pressing threat to the corridor, already squeezed by roads and homes.

Game and Fish protested last year when the Bureau of Land Management, caretaker of this public land, offered leases to drill Trappers Point. Although BLM officials temporarily rescinded the leases, the fate of the migration corridor remains undecided. What happens at Trappers Point will be determined, in part, by BLM's Pinedale Resource Management Plan, which is due out in draft later this winter.

"To industry's credit, they don't particularly want to develop an area that is this important to wildlife," Holz said.

Indeed, industry officials approached Daniel resident and state Rep. Monte Olsen, R, HD 22, and asked him to set up meetings between wildlife officials, conservationists, county planners and drilling companies. So far the ad-hoc group has met twice and industry has put forward a proposal that would prohibit drilling altogether in the core bottleneck area and provide wildlife protection to varying degrees nearby.

The Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance's Tom Darin is "cautiously optimistic" about the negotiations, which aim to present a unified position to BLM.

"So far it's been a productive process," Darin said. The cooperation is unique in a "politically charged atmosphere," fueled by the oil and gas boom in the Upper Green River Basin, he said. If the working group can negotiate an amicable solution that appeases both conservationists and industry, it could serve as a model for the rest of the Upper Green, Darin said.

Although the Alliance has traditionally focused on issues closer to home, the Jackson-based group is taking notice of drilling in the Upper Green because "it's in our backyard," Darin said. "It's going to affect things up here."

From Trappers Point, mule deer continue south to the Pinedale Mesa, which is crucial deer winter range. Here Game and Fish's position on protecting wildlife habitat is less clear-cut than the no-drilling stance at Trapper's Point.

The Mesa is now so congested with tanker trucks, drill rigs and other equipment, that drillers have had trouble moving crews and rigs off the Mesa in a timely fashion, according to BLM. Designated crucial mule deer winter range closes to drilling Nov. 15. Some drillers have received short-term extensions, in part, because of delays due to the number of rigs and crews trying to get off the Mesa.

The Mesa is part of a geologic formation called the Pinedale Anticline, which remained largely untapped until the late 1990s when industry perfected methods for extracting gas from the tight sands formations.

"Pinedale is an exciting place to be, and it's just beginning," J.R. Justus, of Shell Exploration & Production Co., told a room full of industry leaders attending the Wyoming Gas Fair in Jackson in September. Shell began tapping into the Anticline in 2001.

The most prolific fields are on the northern end of the Anticline where drilling is off limits from November to May to protect crucial mule deer winter range. At the gas conference, some industry leaders questioned the closures, asking whether mule deer should stand in the way of economic prosperity.

Some industry officials have predicted Pinedale could surpass the Jonah Field in productivity. BLM is considering approving up to 3,100 additional wells in the Jonah Field, south of the Anticline. So far, BLM has approved up to 700 producing well pads on the Anticline.

The Anticline is more crucial than Jonah for wildlife, particularly the Sublette deer herd, which numbers about 30,000 and populates five mountain ranges in summer, Holz said.

Conservationists helped Game and Fish win a concession for deer as part of BLM's approval of drilling in crucial winter range, Holz said. That concession requires drillers to shut down from Nov. 15 until May to protect wintering wildlife.

"That's been largely the only protection we've had for crucial winter range," Holz said.

The winter range closure is limited in its protections. The closure only affects the drilling of wells. Once wells are drilled, tanker trucks must come in to haul off petroleum byproducts and water produced by the wells. So truck traffic occurs throughout the winter.

"While it's better than nothing, it really doesn't provide protection," Holz said.

So Game and Fish is endorsing a controversial proposal to allow some winter drilling. In exchange, industry is promising to drill fewer well pads. Fewer pads would mean less habitat destruction, a trade-off that might be worth lifting some winter closures, Holz said.

In addition, clustering wells on fewer pads could increase the economic feasibility of installing pipelines to remove water and petroleum byproducts, eliminating tanker trucks altogether, according to industry.

Denver-based Questar Market Resources is particularly constrained by the winter range closures. All of Questar's leases fall in crucial winter range. So the company must shut down drillling for five months.

The company holds leases on 14,800 acres, of which 8,600 have potential for drilling. Already, Questar has drilled 75 wells on about 40 well pads, said Ronald Hogan, general manager of production for the Pinedale project. Questar has permission to drill up to 225 wells at 40-acre spacing but may request up to 430 wells at 20-acre spacing, he said.

Questar is now shopping around a proposal to drill only nine new well pads and to use existing well pads to fully develop the field ­ up to 430 wells. Up to 16 wells could be clustered on a single pad through directional drilling, according to Questar.

But there's a catch. Hogan said Questar needs to drill during the winter to make that proposal viable. BLM is allowing Questar to run one drill rig through the winter this year ­ a concession conservationists oppose. Except for producing oil wells, BLM prohibits human activity in crucial wildlife winter range because such disturbances can stress wildlife at a time when the animals have few calories to spare.

Directional drilling costs about a half million dollars more per well to drill, Hogan said. Moreover, by closing down each winter, Questar loses its crews and rigs, which must find work elsewhere, he said.

Questar does not want to invest in upgrading a drilling rig to drill directionally if the company can not guarantee the rig will be around the following year, he said. Likewise, the company loses productivity because directional drilling is more technically challenging and new crews must be trained each spring, which also raises safety concerns, he said.

Instead of running up to 15 rigs and crews during the summer drilling window, Questar wants to run up to eight crews, directionally drilling year round, he said.

Because Questar now tries to cram in as much drilling as possible in the summer, crews must spread out across the Mesa instead of clustering development, he said. Clustering would reduce roads and traffic, he said. Also, year-round drilling could speed up overall development and get the land reclaimed more quickly, he said.

So far, Questar has sought one-year exceptions to the winter-range closures from BLM. The company has not yet made a formal proposal for a long-term lifting of the closure.

Unlike Game and Fish, conservationists are not yet convinced of the benefits.

"I think they've presented that as a false choice," Darin said. Directional drilling and fewer well pads should be pursued whether or not Questar gets to drill in winter, he said.

Conservationists argue that the public already made a compromise by allowing Questar to drill crucial winter range at all. Moreover, Darin questioned what legal leverage the public would have to hold Questar to its promise of only nine new pads.

Moreover, the Wyoming Outdoor Council's Meredith Taylor called the proposal a "slippery slope" that would encourage other companies to demand winter-drilling exceptions, as well, further diluting the few existing protections for wildlife.

"The other alternative is to slow down," Taylor said. "They're already hitting the areas without winter stipulations hard, and they want to drill this too. We're going to lose one of the most valuable resources we have in Wyoming and that is our wildlife and our open spaces."

So far, Questar has drilled 29 directional wells in summer and winter, Hogan said. Last winter, BLM granted Questar an exemption allowing one rig to drill four directional wells from a single pad despite objections.

On Friday, BLM granted a similar exception, paving the way for Questar to drill up to eight wells on a single pad on the Mesa about six miles southwest of Pinedale. Four of the eight will be drilled this winter. BLM estimates consolidating eight wells on a single pad will reduce habitat disturbance to 13.4 acres, down from 49 acres.

BLM rejected Questar's request to allow two rigs to drill on the one pad through the winter.

BLM granted the exception because of the smaller footprint and because Questar will be drillilng directionally under the breaks ­ a sidehill gully that is prime habitat, offering deer both forage and shelter from the wind.

Directional drilling prevents placing a pad in the breaks, said BLM biologist Keith Andrews. Trying to avoid the breaks is required in the Anticline drilling plan. Conservationists decried the winter drilling exception as a "quid pro quo" for benefits industry is required to provide anyway.

Meanwhile, Questar is funding the bulk of a mule-deer monitoring study designed to detect changes in the herd's survival or reproduction associated with energy development on the Anticline. Although BLM officials are taking the study's yearly results into consideration, a definitive conclusion on the impacts of drilling is not expected until 2007 when five years of data have been collected and analyzed.

Ironically, petroleum industry-funded studies are responsible for generating interest in preserving pronghorn and mule deer migrations and bottlenecks, such as Trappers Point. Ultra Petroleum voluntarily funded two migration studies through the University of Wyoming from 1998 to 2001.

One study followed roughly 300 pronghorn from Grand Teton and another 300 from the Gros Ventre on a 100-plus-mile migration south to the Green River Basin. Monitoring revealed that Grand Teton's pronghorn make one of the longest journeys among big game herds in North America.

The study pinpointed multiple bottlenecks ­ not just Trappers Point ­ and showed oil and gas development is not the only threat to wintering wildlife. Rural sprawl, fences, roads, traffic and recreation also threaten wildlife migration and winter ranges.

As Holz drove around Pinedale, he pointed to rural subdivisions expanding in wildlife movement zones. He stopped at an intersection on Highway 191 on the northern edge of town that is so busy, Game and Fish tried to stop traffic one winter to let bunched up pronghorn cross. If traffic increases too much the migration might cease, he said. Moreover, the migration corridor crosses private lands that could be slated for development.

Near Fremont Lake, Holz described plans to expand a lakeside resort and a proposal for a gun club on BLM land that would have gone precisely where deer migrate. That proposal, thankfully, died, he said.

Though lesser known than Trappers Point, many of these "bottlenecks" are equally important.

Conservationists have proposed collecting royalty payments from oil and gas drilling into a wildlife trust fund to pay for enhancing wildlife migration corridors and winter ranges. The fund could help offset habitat lost on the Mesa by making improvements elsewhere.

During his tour, Holz stressed that much could be done to protect corridors and improve winter range. For example, the Wildlife Heritage Foundation spent $70,000 to redo fencing along Highway 191 north of Trappers Point to make it easier for deer and antelope to cross. The effort reduces road kills along the highway where animals previously got trapped between highway fences, he said.

An industry-supported fund also could pay for purchasing conservation easements on key lands or widening movement corridors narrowed by encroaching pine trees, he said.

The Alliance's Darin agrees such a fund could benefit wildlife. But it should be combined with other measures to protect wildlife on gas fields, he said, and not be viewed as "a green light to create sacrifice zones."

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