A new U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) draft resource management plan for northwestern Colorado would protect the 77,000-acre Vermillion Basin from energy development. The new plan is a sharp turn away from a 2007 draft plan that would have allowed energy development on 93 percent of the 1.9 million acres of mineral rights that are managed by the BLM's Little Snake field office, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. If finalized the new plan will make a total of 242,000 acres off limits to drilling.

"The Vermillion Basin is a stark, untrammeled landscape of fragile beauty," Colorado Governor Bill Ritter said in a statement. "It contains just 2 percent of the high oil and gas potential in the Little Snake management area. But because of the arid conditions that make this basin so spectacular, the impacts of gas development would literally last forever."

The Vermillion Basin region is a high desert region consisting of sagebrush habitat surrounded by multi-colored badlands. The area is known as an important migration corridor for big game species and provides quality, unfragmented sage grouse habitat. The Basin was included in a list of 14 sites for potential monument designation by President Obama, according to a controversial Department of the Interior internal memo leaked in February.

While the environmental community celebrated the decision, local county officials and the oil and gas industry felt the decision undermines years of negotiations to develop the area in an environmentally sensitive manner. Those negotiations were reflected in a 2007 draft BLM plan that was stopped after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency demanded an air quality study on the impact of the more than 3,000 anticipated wells.

"Once again, the Department of Interior has chosen to listen to one set of special interests rather than the balanced recommendations created by countless hours of input from a broad range of community stakeholders engaged over seven years," commented Kathleen Sgamma, director of government affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States. "Rather than allowing a balanced development of energy resources under a very restrictive and protective plan devised by a multiyear community and state effort, Interior has decided that jobs and economic development in northwest Colorado are not that important."

In addition to the protection for the Vermillion Basin, drilling will be prohibited on Cold Springs Mountain and Dinosaur North, and surface disturbance would be prohibited in Little Yampa Canyon. Currently, more than 1 million acres managed by BLM's Little Snake field office have been leased for oil and gas development but less than 15 percent of the leases have been developed.(jas)