Monumental resources

Monumental resources

Protected lands are not the last places nor the best for mineral extractioin

April 3, 2001

The president’s plan to open newly declared national monuments in the West to energy exploration will have some popular support among Americans whose electricity and gas bills have skyrocketed. A Geological Survey report has pointed to five new monuments, including Canyons of the Ancients, as having the potential for "moderate to high" oil and gas volumes, and Bush believes they can be explored without significant negative environmental impacts.

Those who oppose such exploration are being made, in some circles, to sound unpatriotic. Why would anyone oppose cheaper heat and lights? How could anyone justify withholding the resources that would make energy more affordable for all Americans?

It’s not quite as simple as that. Although the resources are there, we don’t need to offer them up just yet.

Of course mineral resources exist under our natural monuments, including Canyons of the Ancients. Also on the list two monuments in California, one in Washington state , and Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument in Montana. Such resources exist across the West. Solid mineral deposits occur in strata that certainly don’t stop at property boundaries; gas and oil occur in vast pools and sometimes petroleum companies have a choice in the access point from which they choose to extract them. A well on one person’s property can pull resources from underneath another’s.

The fact that coal, oil or natural gas exist under public lands doesn’t automatically mean that extraction is feasible, and that’s particularly true in isolated monuments such as Canyons of the Ancients and Upper Missouri Breaks. They’ve sat essentially empty for years when such energy exploration was allowed and even encouraged. Lands adjacent to them have also remained largely untapped. That tells us that, at least for the foreseeable future, there’s not much profit to be had in extracting energy resources from them. We don’t have an energy crisis that justifies production subsidies.

The act that created Canyons of the Ancients was very explicit in allowing the continuation of carbon dioxide extraction. Local jobs were preserved, along with an industry foothold on that plot of public land. Common sense was used; we have no reason to believe it will suddenly disappear from the political landscape.

There’s no arguing that carbon dioxide is a natural gas, but it’s not the one for which consumers across the nation have paid so dearly this winter. It aids in oil extraction, which helps keep gasoline prices down, but in the global scheme of things, our prices aren’t all that high. Also in the larger scheme of things, the McElmo Dome resource is neither vast or long-term; it’s projected to be depleted in our lifetime.

New techniques will be developed, and someday it may be feasible to extract fossil fuels without environmental damage. That day is not here, and neither is the extreme need that requires production without environmental protections.

To those who would argue that we need to keep an open mind about resource extraction on national monuments, we would counter that the wolf is not yet at our door. National monuments are not the last lands available for exploration, nor are they the best. Until we come to that stage of desperation, we can afford to protect them.