TED Magazine - February 2017

WHEN SIDNEY LONGWELL WON A LOTTERY FOR AN OIL AND GAS lease in Montana, he couldn’t possibly have imagined this would become, more than 30 years later, an important legal case testing the federal government’s authority to void such contracts—instead of what he had hoped it would be: a ticket to a more comfortable retirement. On the other side is the BlackFeet Indian tribe ( 17,000 population; former nomadic bison hunters), who contend that the lease in the Badger-Two Medicine area—which abuts their reservation, a wilderness area, and Glacier National Park
24 the ELECTRICAL DIS TRIBUTOR • Feb. 17 www.tEDmag.com
CURRENT / COMMODITIES
ENERGY DROP
Market forces, especially energy prices, will affect just
how heated the environmental battlefield becomes in the
wake of oil and gas lease cancellations in the West. by Ken Stier
along the Canadian border, and is actually in the Lewis and Clark Na- tional Forest—is of “immense cul- tural and spiritual importance” and should be spared drilling. After decades of bureaucratic wavering—with drilling permits granted and then suspended—the Obama administration finally sided with the Blackfeet tribe. Last March, Longwell’s 6,247-acre lease first granted in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan, who wanted to expand oil and gas production on federal lands, was canceled. The still relatively obscure legal case—which pits the Mountain States Legal Foundation (representing Longwell’s firm Solenex) against U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell in D.C. District Court—could have important ramifications for the management of the 640 mil- lion acres owned by the federal government. The Solenex decision is part of a persistent Obama administration agenda to make it harder to develop energy resources on federal lands, said Western Energy Alliance Pres- ident Kathleen Sgamma. Just before Thanksgiving the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) canceled 25 leases in Colorado’s White River National Forest and imposed additional restrictions on others, moves Sgamma said were unprecedented and contrary to American jurisprudence. Obama administration officials insist they have the legal authority to void “legally defective” leases, and that they are just following statutory review requirements. They also pointed out that current oil and gas production on federal lands is dou- ble the levels reached in President George W. Bush’s final year. The Solenex decision came after a lengthy environmental review and a recommendation of the U.S. Forest Service and federal advisory council on historic preservation, which high- © K R I S T I N E K R E A T I O N S / I S T O C K