While vast stretches of federal lands technically may be openfor oil and natural gas exploration, producers still are preventedfrom drilling on them because of restrictions in their leases and asevere backlog of drilling permitting requests, the CEO of theAmerican Petroleum Institute (API) said earlier this week.

Industry critics fail to acknowledge that there are majorobstacles to developing trillions of cubic feet of natural gas thatlie beneath nearly half of all federal lands in western states,API’s Red Cavaney said in a March 27 letter to Rep. Barbara Cubin(R-WY), chair of the House Resources Subcommittee on Energy andMineral Resources.

He argued that members of the Natural Resources Defense Council(NRDC) and the Wilderness Society during a March 15 hearing of thesubcommittee provided “significant distortions” in theircalculations of the amount of federal lands that are off-limits toproducers.

“Importantly, they gloss[ed] over the most significant point:the percentage of government lands available for leasing is ameaningless figure without knowing whether the leases can bedeveloped,” Cavaney wrote.

The NRDC and Wilderness Society officials “surgically selectedcertain data, and omitted other significant data to attempt toprove their inaccurate assertions,” he said. For example, theWilderness Society estimated that only about 3.5% of the federallands in certain western states under the supervision of the Bureauof Land Management (BLM) are closed to producers. But, Cavaneynoted, it failed to point out that the National Petroleum Council(NPC) has identified another 3.2% of BLM lands that are subject to”no surface occupancy.” The combined 6.7% represents 15% of all thenatural gas resources on BLM lands.

Once lease restrictions are factored in, the society concededthat producers are denied access to another 32% of BLM lands. Butit neglected to report that these lease limitations — seasonaland other non-standard stipulations in leases — are responsiblefor taking about 47% of the gas resources under BLM’s control offthe table for producers, Cavaney said. Even more telling, he noted,is that 38.7% of all BLM lands are either off-limit lands or aresubject to lease restrictions, which affects 62% of the gasresources on BLM-supervised lands.

Moreover, he said that the BLM wasn’t the only federal agencyputting restrictions on producers. There are the U.S. ForestService, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the departments of Energyand Defense. The NPC estimates about 137 Tcf of gas resources thatlie beneath federal lands in the Rockies are either off limits toexploration or are heavily restricted, Cavaney said. This is nearlyhalf of the natural gas resources on all federal lands in theregion, he noted.

Also, “inadequate agency resources in many BLM offices andrequired but outdated resource management plans often make itdifficult to get drilling permits, seriously delaying viableprojects for up to 100 days or sometimes years,” according toCavaney. “In the Rawlins, WY, BLM office, for example, thousands ofapplications for permits to drill are awaiting action because ofmanpower shortages. In the Buffalo, WY, office, thousands morecannot even be submitted because the resource management plans forthe coal-bed methane plays in the area are woefully out of date.”

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