The federal Bureau Of Land Management, which controls almost half the land in Utah, proposed this month to charge a $4000 user fee for applications to drill for oil or natural gas on public lands. Orrin Hatch blocked the permit fee with a rider to the energy bill.
Today, applicants are usually charged little or no fee for the permit and the mineral lease associated with it. The BLM spends thousands of dollars processing each application. As a result, today we have a backlog of applications and insufficiently careful review of permits.
Fairly often, the BLM permits drilling in sensitive areas like the archaeological ruins in Nine Mile Canyon. When that happens, we are sometimes lucky enough to have environmental advocates who fight the permit in court. Often we find the BLM didn't have the resources to consider alternatives like directional drilling and less invasive geological mapping techniques.
Worse yet, when oil corporations want to drill in pasture land, we don't always have environmental advocates willing to work for our ranchers and downstream water users. As a result Wyoming and Colorado ranchers and towns have environmental disasters on their hands and many ranchers are on the verge of ruin. Some of this is the result of poor regulation by state bodies, but the BLM is permitting wells strongly opposed in local communities in places like the Book Cliffs.
It certainly does no good for our nation's oil supply or our local economy when good permit applications have to wait in a long queue with these bad ones.
Orrin Hatch claims to have added a few million dollars for permitting to the energy bill, but the BLM figures show that $23.5 million from the fee proposal is needed. That will still be a tiny fraction of the money oil corporations spend on drilling on BLM land.
So why would anyone be opposed to the new user fee? Well, the oil corporations would rather we pay for application processing subsidies out of our tax dollars instead of with user fees. A few abusive drillers even hope to scam the people when BLM makes mistakes. That's all I can see.
Where are Hatch's opponents on this? Steve Urquhart wrote about this, but it's not clear whether he is willing to stand up to oil corporations. Pete Ashdown hasn't published a position, but he has online chat sessions every Thursday night.
Posted by brian at July 31, 2005 06:27 PM