LARAMIE—The BLM has just released a Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Desolation Flats Project, which would allow full-field natural gas development in the southern Red Desert. This area includes parts of the Adobe Town proposed wilderness and the Powder Rim wildlife linkage, an area important to elk and sage grouse.

“Adobe Town is the crown jewel of Wyoming’s high desert wilderness, and a landscape of national park quality,” said Liz Howell of the Wyoming Wilderness Association. “Since this is one of our last best places, it would be a crime to destroy this spectacular landscape.”

The BLM ignored calls to use lower-impact drilling technologies. “We proposed an alternative vision for this project that would use directional drilling to cluster impacts in fewer areas and keep industrial development away from the most sensitive landscapes, but the BLM refused to even consider this very reasonable proposal,” added Erik Molvar of Biodiversity Conservation Alliance. “The BLM is blowing a golden opportunity to balance oil and gas drilling with the protection of sensitive landscapes and habitats.”

If approved, the project would allow the drilling of 385 natural gas wells across a quarter million acres of public land in the southern Red Desert. The Desolation Flats project area neatly bisects the Powder Rim wildlife linkage. This linkage was identified as an important sage grouse and elk movement corridor in the Heart of the West Wildland Network Design, a science-based blueprint for long-term conservation throughout the tri-state region dominated by the high deserts of the Wyoming Basins.

“Between the threats to Adobe Town and the fact that a gas field in this area would effectively cut the Powder Rim wildlife linkage in two, the Desolation Flats project has become the most destructive oil and gas project in Wyoming this year,” added Molvar.

The groups also criticized the BLM’s failure to carefully study the impacts of this major industrial project. “Never before have we seen a major oil and gas project put forward with so little analysis of environmental impacts,” said Tova Woyciechowicz of the Wyoming Outdoor Council. “The BLM made no effort whatsoever to study where the drilling pads, wells, and pipelines would go, and without this information, there is no way for the agency to even guess at the magnitude of impacts to wildlife. And to add insult to injury, the agency has not determined even the baseline wildlife populations in the area, so they will have no way of knowing when a major population crash is occurring as the project moves forward.”

“How many times do we have to defend these rare wild places that Wyoming citizens treasure from this onslaught of oil and gas development?” asked Howell. “The vast majority of our public lands in Wyoming are not in proposed wilderness or in sensitive wildlife habitats, so there are plenty of areas to drill without ripping apart our special places.”

The groups plan to urge the BLM to adopt the “No Action Alternative,” under which drilling would proceed on existing oil and gas leases following individual analysis.

BLM is accepting comments on the Desolation Flats project through June 27th.