UPDATE: Judge gives green light to helium project near Labyrinth Wilderness (Jan.13, 2121)
According to the Deseret News, A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that an exploratory project for helium can proceed in Utah’s Emery County, rejecting claims by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance that federal land managers failed to appropriately weigh its potential impacts.
Specifically, Judge Rudolph Contreras said the benefits of the Bowknot Project next to the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness outweigh any potential environmental impacts because of the supply shortage of helium, a critical gas widely used in medical technology such as magnetic resonance imaging as well as computer hard drives, air bags and cleaning rocket fuel tanks.
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This story, written by Amy Joi O'Donoghue, a reporter for the Deseret News, corrects erroneous information and mischaracterizations of an earlier report published by The Salt Lake Tribune and written by Brian Maffly and national news outlets relying mainly on news releases of environmental groups.
For instance:
- The Tribune's headline indicated, "Groups sue to block helium drilling project inside Utah wilderness"
Tom Wallace, an owner of Colorado-based Twin Bridges, said the company was "not proposing to drill inside the wilderness boundary,” contrary to what has been printed in national publications.
(See detailed description of the proposed well's location below.)
- The Tribune's report quoted this from the lawsuit: "Drilling would 'irreversibly industrialize one of the most remote, spectacular, and undeveloped locations in the United States.' "
Omitted was any mention of Twin Bridges' collaboration with a plaintiff in the lawsuit, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, to mitigate "industrial" viewscapes.
The Deseret News quoted Twin Bridges' Dave Wallace saying, “Twin Bridges, along with its legal counsel, painstakingly tried for over a year to negotiate an amiable solution with SUWA on terms they could accept and went so far as to move the entire well pad over two miles to the northwest and 600 feet lower in elevation to accommodate SUWA’s concern about visual impacts to recreational users.” Wallace said the site was recommended by the organization.
- Twin Bridges' principals were described as “speculators” in media reports detailing the project, which has also been described as one that would use fracking to extract the helium.
- According to the Deseret News, "Tom Wallace said the company’s desire to site a 5.4-acre well pad on federal land near the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness has been caught in a tempest of anti-Trump rhetoric and unfairly painted as a 'rushed' effort to tap what could be a significant helium reserve in the area."
He maintains there was nothing “rushed” about the project because the lease was bought well before the Dingell Act designating the wilderness crossed Trump’s desk, and the project area was carved out of the wilderness designation.
(Twin Bridges won the leases at an auction in December 2018, land which at the time was being considered for inclusion in a national conservation area as part of the Emery County Public Land Management Act [aka the San Rafael Swell Western Heritage and Historic Mining Conservation Area]. They were adjacent to Horseshoe Canyon Wilderness Study Area (WSA), not inside. See timeline of proposals that culminated in formal creation of the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness below.)
UPDATE: Dec. 24, 2020
As expected, the Bureau of Land Management approved the Twin Bridges Bowknot helium project yesterday. Specifically, Roger Bankert, field-office boss in Vernal, authorized:
- Access-road improvements
- Well pad construction
- Construction of an underground well bore to reach Twin Bridges' SITLA lease
- Pipeline construction
The day before, federal district court Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia enjoined the project adjacent to what could be described as one of the United States' last really big undisturbed regions from proceeding until at least January 6. The judge was responding to a lawsuit filed by four environmental groups: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council and Living Waters. Theirs is a "no retreat, no surrender" strategy I, frankly, do not understand.
The resource to be tapped, helium, is scarce, at least on planet Earth. It's non-renewable and not a greenhouse gas but critical in scientific research, medical technology, high-tech manufacturing, space exploration and national defense, according to the BLM. Helium is lighter than air; if released, it just floats into space. The universe brims with it.
About 10 percent of commercial helium is used to fill and propel happy-happy, feel-good balloons into the atmosphere. The balloons eventually burst and fall to the ground, becoming just another way to trash the planet.
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A FEW UNREPORTED DETAILS
By Bill Keshlear
Despite the standard apocalyptic boilerplate of environmentalists and their lawyers – “denuded and disturbed lands and industrial infrastructure,” "irreversibly industrialize," and "obscene, purposeful attack" – the lawsuit charges, less breathlessly, BLM dodged the National Environmental Policy Act's requirement to take a "hard look" at "reasonably foreseeable" impacts, specifically, of climate change.
It targets Trumpian-era provisions supposedly intended to speed up an approval process that sometimes takes years to navigate, part of a "final rush" to "unlock" federal lands and help ease the regulatory burden on corporate interests, according to the meta-narrative that guides assumptions of some editors and writers at The New York Times.
Wilderness aesthetics - “opportunities for solitude and primitive and unconfined recreation” - might not play a meaningful role in the lawsuit because the law that created the “wilderness” in the first place says they don’t have to.
“The fact that non-wilderness activities or uses can be seen or heard from within a wilderness area shall not preclude the conduct of those activities outside the boundary of the wilderness area” (Part II, Subpart B, Section 1232, John Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act).
The climate-change gambit is a delaying tactic environmentalists across the West and their lawyers have used with some success over the past few years to block any and all oil and gas development on federal land regardless of national security or economic need, but I know of no instance in which final approval to drill has been denied because of it.
It's a bold argument given that helium is not a greenhouse gas and by itself has no impact on warming of the planet. The lawsuit says BLM should've but did not analyze possible post-construction impacts that could include infrastructure and pipeline leaks of natural gas and methane, both of which contribute to climate change.
As any homeowner who heats with natural gas and has smelled the tell-tale yuck of rotten eggs knows, leaks can happen.
The final environment assessment (EA) devotes about eight pages to how the construction phase of the project could impact air quality (pages 11-19). The conclusion? Not much.
(BTW: The Salt Lake Tribune duly reported the gas-bag rhetoric under a misleading, probably erroneous, headline, "Groups sue to block helium drilling project
inside Utah wilderness." Click bait for its enviro-oriented readership? It was, at best, misleading and in need of clarification. The Trib was not alone. Every other news outlet I googled did the same thing. The New York Times reported that staffers at Interior acknowledged "the project will harm the area." The article did not explain details related to the supposed harm, and its sources were anonymous. After diving much too deeply into mind-numbing environmental assessments, proposed legislation and lawsuits – prose fit only for technicians, government bureaucrats and hirelings of well-funded environmental organizations – I am convinced nothing, at least on the surface of the legally designated Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness, will be disturbed. Mere mortal, read on if you dare.)
Given what I'd call "Leave No Trace" rules that mandate reclamation during and after construction and drilling, there’s no reason to believe the project will have much of a long-term impact on “opportunities for solitude primitive and unconfined recreation,” wildlife habitat, scenic views or really anything else.
However, as the EA points out, the so-called improved county access roads will be better able to handle big-rig traffic required for drilling operations, while allowing easier access to relatively popular back-country trails by visitors driving run-of-the-mill passenger vehicles. The big rigs would include bus-sized RVs and Winnebago vans tricked out for Type A, fossil-fueled fun. They're a little pricey at $140,000 new, but, conceivably, rentable for a few days out of Moab in the Utah, Nevada and Arizona outback. C'mon down.
That's the long-term threat, if the hordes descending on nearby Arches and Zion national parks and exponential growth of visitors to recently designated Bears Ears National Monument are any indication. Under terms of the lease sale, by 2040 the Twin Bridges project will have packed up, re-seeded and re-graded to restore the land. It'll be long forgotten.
So what's the prognosis?
Tourism, especially the industry niche called "adventure- and eco-tourism," will continue to grow because the world is getting richer and travel more accessible. One billion more people will be in the global middle class by 2030.
Utah’s population is projected to be 5 million by 2050, up from its current 3 million. More places will be threatened — environmentally, socially and aesthetically — by their own popularity. But it’s a problem now, and no relief is in sight. Park City ski resort is the largest ski resort in the United States.
At 7,300 acres, there’s a lot to ski. Yet it has to regularly open satellite parking lots to handle weekend skiers. The slopes are crammed. Picture a slalom course, but the gates are people who zig-zag back and forth across the slope at varying speeds and levels of competence. Collisions with skiers or boarders are real and present hazards nowadays. Avalanches? Not so much. Many skiers just stay home during Park City’s annual Sundance Film Festival. They’ve been displaced by hordes of Hollywood hipsters and wannabes.
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TICK-TOCK: FROM UNDISTURBED WILDS OF UTAH'S HIGH-DESERT TO "WILDERNESS"
Land leased by Twin Bridges after an oil and gas auction in 2018 (about where the two circles are drawn) was not protected by wilderness or any other special designation at the time.
The Emery County Public Land Management Act, introduced in March 2018, included a designated wilderness area called "Horseshoe Canyon (North) Wilderness." It was 26,192 acres. Although the proposal never became law, most of its provisions were included in the omnibus Dingell Act enacted in 2019, two weeks after BLM and Twin Bridges signed the helium deal. The blue lines indicate an area proposed for protection as a national conservation area.
The Dingell Act expanded the Horseshoe Canyon (North) Wilderness to 54,643 and renamed it "Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness." The expansion put Twin Bridges' leases inside wilderness boundaries. The circle highlights a county road ostensibly (but apparently legally) outside the wilderness area that sites a well pad approved by BLM.
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Twin Bridges won the leases at an auction in December 2018, land which at the time was being considered for inclusion in a national conservation area as part of the Emery County Public Land Management Act (aka the San Rafael Swell Western Heritage and Historic Mining Conservation Area). They were adjacent to Horseshoe Canyon Wilderness Study Area (WSA), not inside.
The Emery County Public Land Management Act was introduced into Congress the spring of 2018 by newly elected Republican Rep. John Curtis. It included nothing called Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness. Instead, the general area of the Horseshoe Canyon WSA was expanded and named “Horseshoe Canyon (North) Wilderness.” And it stayed that way at least until after the Curtis bill was marked up by Congress in December and well on its way to passage. The Twin Bridges helium proposal was outside that wilderness proposal as well.
The Dingell Act incorporated Curtis’ bill and about 100 others. It probably is as significant as any environmental law of the past 40 years
The bill passed in bi-partisan fashion and was signed into law in March of 2019 by President Trump (Fancy that! Trump, the enviro). The Horseshoe Canyon Wilderness of Emery County became Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness and more than doubled in size. Twin Bridges' leases all of a sudden were inside the bigger Labyrinth wilderness.
Emery County roads 1025 and 1026 and buffer zones of a couple hundred feet running parallel to them were, weirdly at first glance, excluded from the Labyrinth designation – presumably to dodge ongoing and seemingly interminable ideologically motivated litigation related to ownership of dusty tracks in the middle of nowhere and allow Twin Bridges to exercise its presumably valid oil and gas lease (It's really about helium, a byproduct of natural gas; the idea is to dig for helium with an oil and gas permit in hand because you cannot get helium without getting some natural gas and usually other stuff that has to be separated out and disposed of).
The BLM served up two alternatives to accommodate Twin Bridges' claims: Both use the pre-existing county roads to access and construct drilling pads. One lies at the end of the road, just shy of the wilderness boundary. The other uses another pre-existing county road, but encroaches a bit. Twin Bridges would drill horizontally thousands of feet under the surface of the wilderness and SITLA property to get at what they hope will be pockets of gas laden with helium.
BLM approved the first alternative.
If the project survives the court challenge and Twin Bridges finds something worth bringing to the surface and investors remain committed, they’ll temporarily cap the exploratory well, build a processing plant about five miles down the road, lay a gas pipeline to the well head, bury it and let the gas flow.
It’s hard to imagine the project not eventually going forward, even under a Joe Biden/Deb Haaland Interior Department and the litigation prowess of SUWA and the others.
Twin Bridges seems to have played by the rules. And they’re not the only ones who can deploy high-priced lawyers.