Groups challenge oil and gas leases

"This is the first time an entire lease sale in New Mexico has been protested because of greenhouse gas emissions," said Hans Stuart, the BLM's state communications chief.

The battle over where oil and gas companies can drill has crossed a new threshold.

Seven environmental groups filed a formal protest April 15 against the Bureau of Land Management's intent to award 43 new land leases for oil and gas operations in New Mexico without first assessing the impact on global warming. The action -- like similar protests filed in Colorado and Montana as well -- raises the bar in an escalating battle over the future of oil and gas activities in New Mexico and the West.

"This is the first time an entire lease sale in New Mexico has been protested because of greenhouse gas emissions," said Hans Stuart, the BLM's state communications chief. "All the protests in the past have been over specific leases because of water and wildlife habitat issues."

Erik Schlenker -- Taos-based director of the Western Environmental Law Center's Southwest office and an intervenor in the protest -- said the action is part of a new strategy to force federal scrutiny of greenhouse gasses released through industry operations.

"Past protests have been very site specific and focused on things like wildlife and water, but with climate change, we're talking about a different scale for environmental protection," Schlenker-Goodrich said. "We want the BLM to take a look at the bigger picture."

Oil and gas operations are, indeed, responsible for a lot of greenhouse gasses, according to a November 2006 inventory of emissions in New Mexico prepared by Gov. Bill Richardson's climate change advisory group and cited in the protest filing.

The inventory reported 19.3 million tons of carbon dioxide releases from oil and gas activities in 2000, representing more than 23 percent of total emissions in New Mexico.

That makes the industry the state's second-largest source of greenhouse gasses. In fact, in late 2007 New Mexico became the first state in the nation to require oil and gas operators to track and disclose their emissions.

The protest filing said federal environmental laws -- plus a 2001 order by the Secretary of the Interior requiring climate-change analyses before granting access to federal lands -- obligates the BLM to conduct such reviews, but it has never done so.

The protesters want the bureau to quantify greenhouse gasses from operations, adopt emission limits, impose management and control measures as part of leases, and track and monitor progress, Schlenker-Goodrich said.

"The BLM hasn't addressed this issue and it needs to," Schlenker said. "We want to see more coordination between state and federal governments in this area."

The protest filing has blocked final issuance of 43 leases that were auctioned off in the BLM's April 26 oil-and-gas lease sale, which put nearly 29,000 acres on the block.

Last year, the BLM granted 222 such leases through its quarterly auctions, affecting nearly 192,000 acres of land in New Mexico (see table).

The leases are primarily in the San Juan Basin in the Northwest and in the Permian Basin in the Southeast.

Leases are granted for 10-year periods and extended if production continues after the initial lease expires, said Tony Herrell, the BLM's deputy state director for minerals.

"We're studying the protest through an internal review now," Herrell said. "We expect to have a response within a couple of weeks."

A favorable ruling, however, doesn't seem likely. Herrell said it's too difficult, if not impossible, to determine the impact of emissions from specific sites and operations on global warming.

"There is still a lot we don't know and understand about global warming," Herrell said. "How much an individual action contributes is impossible to determine. Even if we measure emissions from one lease or a number of leases, to determine the direct impact on global warming would be very hard for any scientist to prove. Legal action against lease sales is not the way to resolve global warming."

In any case, Stuart said the BLM has been working with oil and gas companies for more than a decade to introduce equipment and methods to avoid flaring and venting in oil fields. Those efforts have reduced emissions by at least 50 percent, he said.

The protesters are sure to appeal a negative ruling, and Schlenker-Goodrich said they will continue to protest future lease sales.

That has industry leaders concerned. "It's bizarre, but loopholes in federal laws allow groups to make these types of complaints," said Bob Gallagher, president of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association. "These actions force officials to do detailed analyses and that can hold things up indefinitely. The BLM is extremely understaffed. If we require them to do these studies, it slows everything down to a crawl."

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