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http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/feature5/index.html
Demand for natural gas and the resulting land-use pressures are pitting America's Old West against the New.
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/sights_n_sounds/index.html
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/feature5/learn.html
According to the article, the US produced 18.7 trillion cu ft of natural gas during 2004, but consumed 22.2 trillion cu ft during the same period.
Average wellhead price of natural gas was $1.96/ 1000 cu ft in 1998, but in 2004 the price was $5.49, and that was before Katrina.
Air and water pollution is a major problem for those living near a gas field. One family's well has been polluted by nearby drilling activities in which the aquifer filling the well was drained and contaminated. The so-called "nuisance fees" do not cover all the costs to homeowners whose properties are damaged and consequently devalued.
The BLM has been tasked with approving permits regardless of the environmental degradation.
Demand for natural gas and the resulting land-use pressures are pitting America's Old West against the New.
There are a number of places in the Rocky Mountains today where you will find the Old West grinding against the New, and Pinedale, Wyoming, is surely one of them. A quiet, Main Street sort of town (population 1,500) tucked behind a mesa in the sagebrush valley of the upper Green River, Pinedale is known as the home of the Museum of the Mountain Man. And this stretch of the Green is famous as the site of the riotous rendezvous that drew those buckskinned adventurers here in the waning summers of the fur trade. From hills round-about you can see in the east the snow-dusted peaks of the Wind River Range, and the faraway Wyoming Range to westward.
. . . .
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management controls the rights to natural gas around Trappers Point, and it is uncertain when, or whether, the agency will lease it for energy development. But even if the BLM refrains from leasing the point, the migrating ungulates—sometimes numbering in the thousands—face a daunting challenge as they press farther south into their winter range. It happens that the Pinedale mesa not only sits athwart the migration corridor but also overlies the Pinedale anticline, a sandstone formation containing trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. Seven hundred wells have already been approved on the mesa, and 230 are now in production. The gas fields are laced with about a hundred miles (40 hectares) of access roads and pipelines. And as we fly south beyond the mesa, we can see the more tightly spaced well pads of the Jonah Field, with 500 more wells in place and the BLM proposing to increase that number by 3,100.
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/sights_n_sounds/index.html
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/feature5/learn.html
According to the article, the US produced 18.7 trillion cu ft of natural gas during 2004, but consumed 22.2 trillion cu ft during the same period.
Average wellhead price of natural gas was $1.96/ 1000 cu ft in 1998, but in 2004 the price was $5.49, and that was before Katrina.
Air and water pollution is a major problem for those living near a gas field. One family's well has been polluted by nearby drilling activities in which the aquifer filling the well was drained and contaminated. The so-called "nuisance fees" do not cover all the costs to homeowners whose properties are damaged and consequently devalued.
The BLM has been tasked with approving permits regardless of the environmental degradation.