Conservationists File Lawsuit to Halt Drilling in Critical Wildlife Habitat

Lawsuit and Corporate Shareholder Resolution Target ConocoPhillips

Santa Fe, NM - WildEarth Guardians filed suit on May 12th against the Bush administration alleging that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in New Mexico has violated environmental laws when permitting oil and gas development on public lands that have been specially designated to protect wildlife. The lawsuit, which highlights exemptions issued to ConocoPhillips, alleges the BLM consistently allowed oil companies to drill and conduct other activities during critical winter months, waiving requirements that would otherwise seasonally prohibit drilling activities.

WildEarth Guardians has documented over 400 breaches of seasonal closures and timing limitations that are supposed to protect wildlife from disturbance by oil and gas drilling and related activities. The BLM adopted these timing restrictions to help protect mule deer, elk, and pronghorn in the region. However, the federal agency is routinely allowing oil and gas companies to avoid these restrictions without any public involvement or analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

"Just an e-mail or phone call from an oil company, and the Bureau of Land Management brushes aside key wildlife protections that it promised on public land," stated Robert Ukeiley, the Climate and Energy Director at WildEarth Guardians. "It's not just a few exceptions - the feds are consistently telling oil and gas companies that they don't have to worry about wildlife," continued Ukeiley.

WildEarth Guardians is also employing a new strategy -- corporate shareholder activism -- to attempt to bring reforms in how ConocoPhillips conducts its operations in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico. A shareholder resolution, filed at ConocoPhillips' annual shareholder's meeting in Houston in conjunction with shareholder groups, a socially responsible investment firm (Boston Common) and other activists asks the company to seek the consent of indigenous people, including Navajos, prior to pursuing oil and gas development.

The resolution was filed in partnership with the Church of the Brethren, an institutional investor, and with Amazon Watch, Racimos de Ungurahai, a Peruvian indigenous rights group that is confronting the threat of oil and gas development in the Amazon and Diné Care, a Navajo environmental group.

"We've focused on ConocoPhillips because they are, by far, the largest operator in the San Juan Basin; they control up to 75 percent of the leases in the area," said John Horning, WildEarth Guardians' Executive Director who attended the annual shareholder's meeting in Houston, TX earlier this week. "The purpose of this shareholder resolution is to see if we can get the company to be more transparent and respect the environment and the rights of indigenous people across the globe to have prior and informed consent."

Horning added that he is discouraged because the company is paying lip service to following higher environmental standards while it continues to take advantage of its cozy relationship with the BLM to avoid environmental scrutiny of its drilling activities in the northwestern New Mexico.

The BLM's practice of issuing exemptions is practically dictated by President Bush's May 18, 2001Executive Order 13212 requiring BLM and other federal agencies to take "Actions to Expedite Energy-Related Projects."

"Sadly, the BLM's practice of allowing the oil and gas companies to get the fossil fuels out to the determent of our public lands and wildlife ignores the fact that the federal government could be helping us to move to a Clean Energy future by fostering safe, renewable energy like wind and solar as well as increased energy efficiency," added Ukeiley.

The BLM acknowledges that it has swept aside its wildlife protection promises for the convenience of industry, stating to ConocoPhillips in 2006, "…we have been very liberal in granting exceptions." ConocoPhillips has requested more exceptions to wildlife closures than any other company operating in northwest New Mexico. The runner up is Burlington, which ConocoPhillips acquired last year.

Read the complaint (PDF) (opens in new window)

Contact: Robert Ukeiley, Climate & Energy Program Director, 720-563-9306 John Horning, Executive Director, 505-988-9126 x1153 Samuel Sage, Diné CARE, 505-360-2090

Background information

Two field offices of the BLM in New Mexico have adopted seasonal closures and then allowed those closures to be systematically violated: the Farmington and Carlsbad Field Offices. These field offices are respectively located in the northwest corner of the state, overlying the San Juan Basin, and the southeast corner, overlying the Permian Basin. Both basins are already intensively drilled for oil and gas, with thousands of additional wells on the horizon. They are ground zero for oil and gas extraction in New Mexico.

Since the settlement of a lawsuit with WildEarth Guardians, which is now WildEarth Guardians, and other groups in April 2006, the number of waivers to timing stipulations granted in Carlsbad has sharply dropped to less than ten per year. The settlement requires that lesser prairie-chicken surveys and a public process occur prior to any waivers being granted. In contrast, Farmington is issuing an average of 110 per year with no public notice.

Carlsbad has allowed at least 516 breaches of lesser prairie-chicken timing stipulations since adopting the restrictions in 1997. The timing limits are meant to protect the bird, which is a formal candidate for Endangered Species Act protection, from noise during its breeding months. Lesser prairie-chickens have intricate mating rituals, including dancing and emitting "booming" noises on their traditional dancing grounds, called "lek" sites. When new drilling and other noisy oil and gas operations occur during spring breeding, female prairie-chickens have difficulty locating males, thus hindering reproduction. Noise surveys conducted by the BLM have shown that visitors to lands managed by the Carlsbad Field Office are nineteen times more likely to hear a pumpjack or a compressor than to hear the wind.

Farmington has allowed at least 441 breaches of seasonal closures since their adoption in 2003. The closures are meant to protect mule deer, elk, pronghorn, and other wildlife during critical winter months and spring and summer breeding periods. Some breaches involve drilling multiple gas wells or allowing gas exploration across vast acreages (19,000 acres in one instance). Three specially designated areas - Rosa Mesa, Middle Mesa, and Rattlesnake Canyon - are taking the brunt of the exceptions, as they collectively account for about half of all the exceptions allowed by Farmington BLM. Rattlesnake Canyon is the most abused area, with at least 97 exceptions to wildlife closures granted there.

The Farmington BLM office approves an average of approximately 89 percent of the company requests it receives for exceptions to wildlife closures. In some years, its approval rate has been even higher - 99 percent. Many requests are granted within a day. No public notice or public process is conducted. The BLM often describes bleak conditions in the specially designated areas in which it is allowing seasonal closures to be breached, including extremely high well and road densities; a lack of browse plants, including true mountain mahogany, Wyoming big sagebrush, and antelope bitterbrush; consumption of juniper and pinyon pine by mule deer as starvation food, which causes abortion; and a lack of hiding cover for the animals.

Most of the closures in Farmington run from December 1 - March 31, and the BLM often justifies exceptions on the basis that they are at the front or back end of the closure period. However, exceptions have been granted in every month from December - March since the seasonal closures were approved in Farmington's 2003 Resource Management Plan.

In December, a coalition of more than forty individuals and groups representing hunting, conservation, and business, called on the BLM and the state to enforce the seasonal restrictions on oil and gas drilling and other disturbing activities and to withdraw some key areas from drilling altogether.

The Game & Fish Department met with BLM in February 2007 to discuss reforms regarding wildlife exceptions, including better documentation of the amount of existing disturbance from oil and gas development and possible modification of the criteria used to grant exceptions. But the BLM has failed to update the amount of drilling disturbance, relying on 2003 data despite the rapid pace of drilling since then. In a March 2007 response, the BLM refused the state's request to revisit the exceptions criteria.

In response to a WildEarth Guardians' report on the breach of the closures, the BLM has maintained that wildlife populations at issue are not in jeopardy and that the exceptions are being granted for low-impact or even environmentally protective measures, such as pit closures. However, every year, many exceptions in Farmington are granted for new wells, roads and pipelines - activities that are neither routine nor environmentally beneficial. In contrast, pit closures seldom show up in the BLM's database of exceptions.

In the Farmington area, the BLM itself notes the threats facing elk and mule deer herds as they migrate south from Colorado and enter the intensively developed oil and gas fields in northwest New Mexico. The habitat is so damaged and forage so limited that mule deer have taken to eating pine needles, which causes abortion and starvation. The pronghorn populations in Farmington are tiny remnants.

Conservationists contend that the BLM is reneging on a key mitigation promised in its plan through an entirely private process that places oil and gas profits above the public interest in healthy wildlife populations.


 

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