How is it that a Democrat became elected governor of Wyoming in 2002?
The answer to that question is a story with wide-ranging implications about energy and environment, about ranchers and energy developers, about state and federal government in the rough and tumble politics of the West. Below is Part One of a three-part series that I am writing to tell this story, so that we may learn about the battles that have shaped the emerging strategy of the Western Democrat, and how we can strategize to both win elections and find solutions to the problems cropping up in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, and beyond.
Introduction
It has been suggested in a previous diary by John West that the reason we have Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, as governor in Wyoming is as follows:
What's surprising is that Wyoming has a Democrat for Governor. There's a pretty simple reason for that as far as the folks around here are concerned, the last candidate the Republicans put up for the office was so whacko in his conservatism that a lot of folks who had never voted for a Democrat in their lives just shook their heads and voted for the Democrat. Common sense rules around these parts.
While I appreciate the "refined simplicity" that John is trying to portray, that itself does not account for such an extremely unlikely political reconfiguration--after all, in 2004 Wyoming went 69-29 for Bush over Kerry, two years after electing this Democratic governor.
Rather, the cause is much more signficant: a realignment of conservative landowners in Wyoming voting Democrat to fight back against Big Energy. Understanding this realignment will help Dems make gains in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico, as well as better understand the battle over energy and land in the West.
In just the past year alone, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has approved 5,700 new drilling permits in Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana - an increase of about 62 percent over the previous year. It only represents the continuation of a trend that started as early as the late 1990s, when hot natural gas markets and tax incentives created a rush that began transforming locales across the west. Increased industry research, continuing high energy prices, and the dry-up of other sources has driven forward the boom until today, which involves a variety of extraction methods for oil and gas. One form of natural gas in particular drives the current rush: coalbed methane gas, with over 50,000 wells across the West and another 100,000 expected in the next decade.
What is Coalbed Methane Gas?
Coalbed methane gas (CBM) is the same as natural gas; the difference is that the natural gas is deposited in coal. While in conventional oil and gas resevoirs production comes from oil and gas above water contact, in CBM water completely permeates the coal beds and its pressure causes the methane to be absorbed onto the grain surfaces of the coal. To produce CBM, water must be drawn off first to lower the pressure and draw the methane out of the coal.
CBM is attractive because a coalbed stores six times as much gas as a conventional natural gas resvoir of equal volume; it is estimated that recovering just 15% of CBM would yield enough gas to meet US natural gas demand for more than a decade. Moreover, many coalbeds are at shallow depths, making well drilling and extraction much less expensive than in conventional resevoirs. Also, since the nation's coalbeds have already been well mapped, the discovery of CBM is a less time- and resource-intensive process.
(See an industry primer on CBM in PDF format here.)
As such, CBM has gone from being a negligible source of natural gas in 1990 to nearly 10% of supply in 2005, and extraction continues to expand by leaps and bounds.
CBM, however, requires pumping large amounts of water out of coalbeds, and the result is enormous discharge of brackish, saline water unsuitable for consumption and often unsuitable for agricultural purposes. Volumes of discharge vary, with an average CBM well discharging on about 20,000 gallons per day and larger wells known to discharge more than 100,000 gallons per day--an olympic swimming pool every 9 days. There are several ways to dispose of the wastewater in a responsible manner, from collecting it in evaporation ponds to reinjection back into the aquifer. It appears, however, that the majority of wastewater is dumped into streams or allowed to permeate through the soil into shallow aquifers.
As a result, CBM has produced two major problems: the rapid draw down of aquifers, and the salinzation of soil, groundwater sources, and waterways--not to mention all the negative impacts of a drilling bonanza: reckless planning, soil erosion, noise, pollution, and a threat to wildlife.
State | Tons (in billions) | Percent of US |
Montana | 120 | 25.4 |
Illinois | 78 | 16.5 |
Wyoming | 68 | 14.4 |
West Virginia | 37 | 8.0 |
Kentucky | 30 | 6.3 |
Pennsylvania | 29 | 6.1 |
Ohio | 19 | 4.0 |
Colorado | 17 | 3.6 |
Texas | 13 | 2.7 |
Indiana | 10 | 2.1 |
Other states | 51 | 10.9 |
SOURCE: Coal: Ancient Gift Serving Modern Man, American Coal Foundation, 2002.
But if there are vast reserves across the US, why are western states dealing with it most controversially? One factor is that CBM deposits are concentrated here; while not all coalbeds contain CBM, the coal seams running through the Rocky Mountains are rich with it, and over one-third of all US coal deposits lie in these two states alone (see above chart). The richest deposits lie below the Powder River Basin along the Wyoming-Montana border, which is estimated to contain about half of all recoverable CBM in the Rocky Mountain region.
But those are just sidenotes. The reason Wyoming landowners have been up in arms, like others across the West, is due to a curious legal twist on land ownership: the split estate.
What is a split estate?
Wyoming, like most other western states, separates the ownership of land into ownership of the surface and ownership of the subsurface. The ownership of the subsurface, which is often called the "mineral rights" of a piece of land, can be owned by a different party than the surface inhabitant--and this is often the case in Wyoming, where homesteading in the earl 1900s left mineral rights in the hands of the government. Booms in new real estate development over the last thirty years have dealt almost only with surface ownership while keeping mineral rights in the hands of previous owners or the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Of all land in Wyoming, 50% of mineral rights are held by the BLM, 6% are held by the state, and the remainder is held privately (Source: High Country News).
According to Wyoming law, owners of the mineral rights on a plot of land could lease or sell access to the resources without notifying the surface owners. This subsurface access supercedes surface access; that is, while a surface owner could negotiate with energy companies for at least some compensation, ultimately they had no power to stop drilling on their land--an insidious setup for many landowners, no doubt. Yet until the late 1990s, these mineral rights were often held for years without any action, with the occasional mining operation here or oil exploration there--just isolated cases. It was an annoyance.
But then the boom hit. Landowners in Wyoming were startled to wake up and find notices posted declaring the commencement of drilling on their property. When they found out that they could do nothing to stop it, they became angry. And when they found they had no input on how, when, or where wells would be set up and received a pittance compensation for the wastewater dumping and other pollution that forever changed their lands, they became thoroughly outraged.
And this is what it was like (from an article in 2002):
One morning, a man shows up at your front door. You may be a rancher with 10,000 acres near Leiter or a new retiree just settling onto a 40-acre spread on the outskirts of Sheridan. The man at the door tells you he owns a lease to the mineral rights under your land, that his company has filed a bond to cover reclamation costs, and that he and his men intend to begin drilling. Just how it becomes clear that you have no say in the matter depends on the man standing at the door. There have been as many as 75 methane companies at work in the Powder River Basin over the past few years, most of them small. Some are courteous and circumspect, others sloppy and belligerent. There's a little room for negotiation, but usually only about the rental fee and reclamation costs the company will eventually pay for the damage it does to your land. If the man at the door holds a legal lease to develop the mineral rights under your land -- no matter whether his company obtained the lease from a BLM auction or from private mineral owners -- all you can really do is stand by and watch when the trucks finally arrive and the bulldozer comes down the ramp. It makes no difference what plans you had for the land. They come second to the plans the lease owner has.
This is exactly what happened to Buck and Mary Brannaman, who own a small ranch south of Sheridan. "They showed up," Buck Brannaman told me, "dropped the blade on a D9 Cat, and went right up the hill, pushing topsoil out of the way like it was snow." It was a swift, brutal education in the mechanics of coalbed methane extraction. Methane wells are dug by truck-mounted rigs, but in most cases, of course, the wells are dug where there are no roads. So the crews cut roads to the site of each well, slicing across pastures and fence lines, paying no regard to the contours of the land. The Brannaman ranch lies in a knot of grassy hills. As winter came and went, and the bulldozer came and went with it, the main access roads turned into deep trenches, sluicing runoff and causing serious erosion. The crew cut enormous gouges into the sides of the hills for the wellpads, dumping the topsoil down the slope. They dug ten of the projected thirteen wells; then the crew capped the wells and packed up and pulled out, having done just enough exploration, Brannaman suggests, to hold on to the mineral lease. If the crew had been working on federal land, they would have been subject to close technical oversight and serious restrictions on how they managed their development. But not on private land.
CBM wells must be densely packed, sometimes as dense as one well per 20 acres; the result was that a single site often featured dozens of wells. Roads, pipelines, powerlines, wellheads, noisy compressor stations all cropped up to connect these wells, and wastewater dumping went forward virtually unrestricted. All of this against the will of many landowners.
Wedged by the split estate?
The growing tensions first came to light in articles like this one from 2000:
Republican Gov. Jim Geringer, whose slogan is the state is "open for business," says he has no power to bring order to Wyoming's latest boom.
...
Ranchers aren't the only landowners feeling the impacts of methane development. In subdivisions around Gillette, Sheridan and Buffalo, landowners complain of damage to their water supply, decreased property values and increased traffic and congestion. Several gas companies are interested in drilling within Gillette city limits.
"I've lived in Wyoming for 40 years, and my husband is a native," says Rebecca Claar, almost sobbing in frustration over a methane gas drilling project in the Red Rocks subdivision outside Gillette, where she lives. "I can't believe we have such a ruthless industry in our midst that doesn't give a damn about the water.
"There's a lot the governor can do, but he won't," she adds.
Geringer's philosophy was summed up in an article with the 2001 headline of "Wyoming's Powder Keg", which referred to the political unrest that was coming out:
Republican Governor Jim Geringer has insisted that state agencies not stand in the way of development, saying the state would speak with a "unified voice" to move development along...encouraging drilling companies to "Go Blue!" - to drill on the state sections, marked in blue on most land-use maps, rather than wade through the cumbersome permitting process for federally owned gas.
And followed with this (from an article in 2002):
For people worried about coalbed methane development on private lands, local governments seem to be the only line of defense. Higher levels of government have not been tough enough.
The federal government still owns oil and gas rights beneath some private land in the West, but it's a patchwork, and typically states take the lead in regulating drilling. Pro-industry state agencies such as the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and the Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation have tended to be enablers, granting permits for wells with minimal protection for the environment and little opportunity for public input. Most of their leaders and staffers are tied to the industry, a preference backed by the state legislatures.
In the courts, where struggles for local control are fought, it's a lawsuit free-for-all based on a conflicting jumble of laws. Counties, cities and towns have powers over land use, spelled out in state laws, but these powers conflict with other state laws that call for no oil and gas to be "wasted," much the same way that water is supposed to be put to "beneficial use."
Wyoming's state agencies were no different. Landowners realized that their battles were at the state level, and it was only after initial suggestions for reform were rebuffed by a supposedly friendly Republican governor (and legislature) that they realized nothing would change and started expressing anger:
"I'd be more comfortable with this if the state of Wyoming had said, 'We have this wonderful opportunity and we're going to slow down and look at our options.' The approach Governor Geringer took was basically to try to slicky it by us."
And:
"It's sad to say, but our state government doesn't care about what happens to us. They don't care about the damage we're going to get. They're telling these companies, 'Drill no matter what, we want your money.' We were here before methane was here, and we'll be here after methane was here, if we can. So yeah, I think they ought to be a little considerate of us. Because the methane company will be here 10, 20 years at the most, and then they're gone. It's true we don't produce the amount of money for the state the methane companies do, but that still doesn't make it right to basically tell us we aren't worth considering. That's disappointing."
And:
"I've told them (drillers) all the same story. If you guys want to play hardball, I'll play hardball. I've been around the block. So part of the terms and conditions of this agreement is you take total responsibility, so the ranch gains and you gain, or you don't get access. They say, well, we can force access. Fine, go ahead and do it. I'll put a gate every 30 feet on the road that's hard to open. I'll feed all the cattle on the road in the winter just before you show up to work. I'll throw spikes on the road. You start harassing cattle, opening gates, and then we'll talk."
Many landowners had enough and joined a chorus for change that included environmental groups they had once despised, such as the Wyoming Outdoor Council and Powder River Basin Resource Council, and hunters with op-eds like this lamenting the rampant overdevelopment.
It didn't help that the Republican candidate for governor was a state senator in the pocket of the energy industry and himself operated a oil/gas outfit while in office, despite repeated criticisms of his conflict of interest. In one of the many newspaper editorials endorsing Freudenthal, Rob Shaul, editor of the rural Pinedale Roundup, called the Republican challenger "the establishment candidate of the Wyoming Republican party, and I feel the Republican Party has a rot growing at its core because of its super-cozy relationship with the state's mineral and ranching industries." Shaul said he planned to vote Democrat "for the first time in my voting life," a sentiment echoed by many.
And so in 2002, in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one and the Vice-President personally backed the Republican candidate, Democrat Dave Freudenthal (read more about him here) squeezed out a razor thin 3,800-vote upset by declaring that he would not knuckle down to energy companies and was committed to passing split estate reform.
To come...
Tune in for Parts Two and Three, when we follow the split estate battle of Wyoming, the shift in anger toward the BLM, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer's entry into the CBM fray, and the lessons Dems can learn from this ongoing battle.
And let me know if you like this work! I'm putting in a lot of time to research this and craft a narrative, and the most joy I can get is discussion, debate, and feedback.