From the Aspen Daily News

Sarah Gilman – Aspen Daily News Staff Writer

Tue 01/08/2008 11:00PM
Project would cut through roadless areas outside C’dale

The Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop plans to sue the U.S. Forest Service for giving the green light to a massive natural gas pipeline that will cut through roadless lands northwest of Carbondale.

The environmental nonprofit contends that the Bull Mountain pipeline project is a stark violation of the recently reinstated 2001 Roadless Rule, which bars road construction on more than 50 million acres of roadless National Forest lands, because it will necessitate a 100-foot-wide cleared “construction corridor” for heavy truck and equipment traffic, as well as wider staging areas and pullouts, across eight miles in three designated roadless areas.

“They’re trying to say what looks like a road, smells like a road, and acts like a road is not a road,” said Wilderness Workshop Director Sloan Shoemaker. “We’re going to call bull on that and go to court.”

The Wilderness Workshop, joined by a cadre of Western Slope environmental groups including Western Colorado Congress, Western Slope Environmental Resource Council, and the High Country Citizens’ Alliance, announced its intention to sue Tuesday after the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service issued their final record of decision approving the proposed Bull Mountain pipeline route and authorizing energy companies to begin construction across 25.5 miles of BLM and National Forest land as soon as this summer.

The Forest Service argues the construction corridor is not a road because even temporary roads require design, grading and drainage structures.

“The BLM and the Forest Service agree that the selected alternative is the most appropriate course of action because it … disturbs the fewest acres; it installs the fewest miles of pipeline; and it involves the fewest miles of road construction,” the agencies stated in a joint press release. The route “also minimizes the negative effects to soils, wetlands, road corridors, and it meets the visual quality and air quality objectives for the area.”

The proposed pipeline, which would serve the energy companies S.G. Interests and Gunnison Energy, would be 20 inches in diameter and follow an existing buried gas line through the roadless lands. The final, revegetated corridor would be about 50 feet wide, with obstructing trees and boulders to keep motorized vehicles out.

“I’m very glad (the federal agencies) have finally issued the decision,” said Gunnison Energy President Brad Robinson. “There are literally tens of thousands of acres of leases that we could not develop without this pipeline.”

Robinson said that the companies have no intention of running roughshod over the landscape.

“We have a tremendous responsibility to have as little impact as we can,” he said, noting that the companies will work closely with both federal and local officials.

Robinson disagreed with environmental groups’ interpretation of the Clinton-era Roadless Rule. The law clearly “intended all along to allow the construction of pipelines (through some roadless areas),” he argued.

The companies hope to begin construction on the pipeline – which could eventually feed about 400 million cubic feet of natural gas per day into the national grid – by this summer, pending approval of county permits.

That means the environmental groups will file their case in the Federal District Court of Colorado “as soon as possible” in hopes of keeping the project from moving forward, said the groups’ attorney, Robin Cooley of Earthjustice.

But the roadless issue is not the only concern groups will tackle in the lawsuit, Wilderness Workshop’s Shoemaker said.

“The White River and the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre (national forests) are continuing to approve oil and gas activity citing the authority of Environmental Impact Statements done in 1993,” he said. “They never anticipated the scope of gas development (happening now). The agencies are essentially flying blind and approving activity without fully analyzing its environmental impacts.”

The pipeline would open the landscape above it to hundreds of new wells, he said. “What’s going to happen upstream? They’ve really ignored that question.”