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created over 4 years ago | Tagged: |
Byron
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\nBIRNEY, Montana (Reuters) - The log cabins and dirt roads on Jeanie Alderson's isolated ranch suggest little has changed since her great-great aunt and uncle first came to the rolling hills of southeastern Montana 120 years ago.\n\nYet with energy prices at record highs, she fears that interest in long-dormant rights to develop oil and gas resources underneath her land could badly upset the natural beauty and balance of the rugged American West.\n\n"No one in 1916 or 1909 had any concept of strip mining or coalbed methane pumping out, and the devastation," Alderson said. "When you start pumping out groundwater, we think, 'Uh oh, there goes my livelihood."'\n\nDivided ownership of land above and below ground -- known as split estates -- has deep roots in the American West, where the federal government offered cheap land to settlers and railroad companies but often kept subsurface rights.\n\nToday, the government manages 700 million acres of mineral rights. On 58 million of those acres, mostly in the West, others own the rights to the surface.\n\nEnvironmentalists complain that the Bush administration has dramatically expanded mineral leases in energy-rich states such as Wyoming and Montana, and they say oil and gas companies are scrambling for a piece of the action before President Bush leaves office in January.\n\n"In the closing days of the Bush administration we are seeing this enormous rush to lease everything gas-related," said Teresa Erickson, staff director of the Northern Plains Resource Council, an environmental group.\n\nState governments also lease mineral rights, but some regional officials say it is federal leasing that threatens their wildlife and the environment.\n\n"The level of leasing in recent years has been breathtaking," Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, told Reuters. "The arrogance of this administration vis-a-vis federal lands -- it dwarfs the previous administrations."\n\nAccording to the U.S. Minerals Management Service, which collects revenues on federal leases for oil, gas, coal and other solid minerals, the federal government sold leases on 47,497,077 acres in the 2007 fiscal year, compared with 37,448,305 acres in fiscal 2001, a 27 percent increase.
