OCR Text |
Show Western Resources Public land leasing, on-shore oil and gas I gy Helene C. Monberg v ashington--"Interior Secretary Watt and his staff want more on ?1 oil and gas leasing, but they have i made the hard decisions yet to bring tout " an old Interior Department V wdtol'd Western Resources Wrap-up j J,W) i May I This is true, WRW has learned, even M applications for both competitive v, non competitive leases, rights of S "JV and exchanges have backed up in testate Bureau of Land Management ices by the thousands. tolerior has moved slowly in getting 'V i.f posts filled, providing policy - lidance for such leasing. Confirma- L are just now coming from the I j Senate to fill such key jobs as Assistant yTretary for Land and Water - Ljrces, Assistant Secretary for Lgy and Minerals, and director of Bureau of Land Management. N Some legislation will be necessary to v bBje some of the problems relative to iblic land oil and gas leasing and the yirig of tar sands and oil shale (jeposits, but the Administration has tiled no position on the bills that have introduced, according to both (oternment and industry experts. In sum, the fast action that Watt and cs staff took on stepping up leasing on b Outer Continental Shelf has not Ktn matched by similar action : dative to on shore public land leasing. 3 Both Congress and industry are get-, e iQg a bit edgy about the inability of ::" Kilt 1 Co. to move ahead to solve some ;-i (ile problems relative to on shore oil !t iid gas leasing. The House Public i" iids Subcommittee held an oversight : earing on May 14 on some of these EOS. i? Of particular concern is the lifting of moratorium on oil and gas leasing on k lilitary lands. Such a moratorium was - lamped on acquired military and aval lands by former Interior taetary Cecil D. Andrus on Nov. 2, Pi' f), following allegations of ir-k ir-k (gularities in the approval of 20 oil and as leases issued non-competitively by it LM at Fort Chaffee, Ark. There have tit kb reports for weeks that this K- loratorium will be lifted. WRW was k MonMay 13 that Watt tentatively has x (tided to lift it partially. h'- HUGE BACKLOG OF OIL AND (5 GAS APPLICATIONS Some 34,000 applications for on shore "Hand gas leases are pending at BLM late offices and in the regional offices (the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). The ,L ; Ui total was 32,987 as of Jan. 1 with K' lore than 4,000 pending in Montana ml Alaska, and some 5900 pending in be:-' leEastern states. In addition, 1,014 ap-t ap-t : (cations were pending in the Forest si- Wee as of May 8. Howard E. Banta, I fetor of Minerals and Geology for lis B, told WRW on May 8 most of the SFS applications are for leasing in the i e iational Forests in the Overthrust Belt ' 'He Northern Rocky Mountain chain, ;t Hably in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho i6?- WUtah, and in the Southern end of the t Wachian Mountain chain in the 1?; ftitheastern part of the country. J. ", to following table shows the number 'W applications pending by state: can also eliminate many counties from this request. Nevada has only one county coun-ty with a KGS, and of the 33 counties in New Mexico, only eight have producing wells. So we could eliminate virtually all of Nevada and 25 counties in New Mexico from this request for information informa-tion from GS. Such a request takes about two weeks' time. We can eliminate it entirely entire-ly for many applications under this new procedure," Zimmerman told WRW. If and when gas or oil is found in new areas, USGS can let BLM know, and it can alter its procedures to allow for the new information, he added. BLM published a notice in the Federal Register on Jan. 23 that it plans to exclude categorically from environmental en-vironmental impact assessments certain cer-tain types of areas where a prior environmental en-vironmental assessment (EA) has been prepared, where a planning document would serve as an adequate basis for a leasing decision, or where a checklist of nine items indicates no unusual environmental en-vironmental impacts are to be expected. ex-pected. If the checklist triggers one or more items indicating there are environmental environmen-tal problems an EA can be prepared for those few areas. We have drilled a lot of oil and gas wells in this country, and we know most of the impacts have been minimal, Zimmerman told WRW. One of the most interesting plans that BLM has already started to put into operation is to ask certain retirees to return to BLM for limited time periods to help cut back on the backlog in the states with the largest number of piled up applications. Zimmerman is talking about 30 day stints for retirees. "We expect to get an additional $1 million in the 1981 supplemental appropriations ap-propriations bill to help us out in this regard. No slots are included, so we plan to use retirees and some temporary tem-porary help," Zimmerman stated. Zimmerman has also received a staff request for an additional $1.6 million in the 1983 budget to hire about 20 more adjudicators and supporting staff. This would increase by about 10 percent the number of adjudicators at BLM with authority to act on oil and gas leasing applications, he said. Now it has about 200. BLM is also considering cutting back on the hours that its public records on oil and gas leasing are open to the public, including serial register books and plats or maps. In the past the public had access to these records from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Now the hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. This doesn't give the clerks enough time to keep the records updated and current, Zimmerman said. "We are either going to have to cut back the hours that the records are open to public inspection or we are going to have to put some clerks on flexitime to improve the service to the public," Zimmerman told WRW. This is one time when fewer federal hours of public availability of records would actually improve service, Zimmerman underscored. BLM has already transferred its recent re-cent review of applications for fraud from the state offices to the office of the )IS sS pending on filed between Comparison 1-1-81 7-1-80 & 1-1-81 With pending on 0' 11-15-79 l:"k 4.068 79 NA L'l!0na 2,304 1.370 558 !lUfrnia 1(199 ' 572 1. 284 :rfc tl!oao 1249 466 704 !,etn states 5902 1155 4,062 J 1,194 299 1.325 0? 4,906 764 3.372 iB1' 2,352 809 1.789 -' Ko 3i484 1,270 2.636 ,.Sn 2.718 1.142 l.7 S 1.735 981 449 1.876 917 759 .5 32,987 9.624 18.395" i, in9ing land status precludes comparison k .. !tal not include Alaska for comparison purposes S! Bureau of Land Management, Interior Department. March 1981 It announced on April 30 that it wanted public input to identify more than 100 million acres of land in Alaska under consideration for oil and gas leasing. "This is the first step in opening millions of acres in Alaska to oil and gas leasing," the Department said. It wants identification of areas both ways: to lease and not to lease. Both the non competitive lease system on public lands run by the Interior In-terior Department and the collection of royalties from oil and gas leases on federal and Indian lands are under review, with hopes of improving both and cutting down on fraud and abuse in both systems. Watt has outlawed going to an all competitive leasing system on public lands, as proposed by Sen. Dale Bumpers, D-Ark., and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., among others. The Administration Ad-ministration is expected to make proposals pro-posals later in the year on improving the non competitive leasing system. The American Petroleum Institute in February formed a public lands task force, with Douglas Henderson moving over from the Rocky Mountain Oil and Gas Association (RMOGA) to head the new API public land unit as executive director. Previously, Henderson had worked for RMOGA in Denver and, more recently, in Washington. |