"Park Service May Strengthen Its Oil And Gas Regulations"

"Current rules give the agency little leverage to protect lands or restore damage once drilling companies pull out."

"For years, the company operating oil wells in New Mexico’s Aztec National Monument was exempt from being regulated by the National Park Service, which manages the site to protect ancient Pueblo structures. As a result, a dirt access road to one of the wells runs directly over buried ruins. A park archeologist once watched as a grader resurfacing the deeply rutted road exposed archeological remnants.

The damage to these remnants of an early civilization is just one of many negative consequences of the 9B rule that gives the National Park Service only weak authority to regulate oil and gas drilling on its property. The Park Service this week proposed strengthening the rule. Patrick O'Dell, a petroleum engineer for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, who worked on the proposal in a previous job for the Park Service, called the current rules “grossly inadequate” for restoring the landscape after drilling is done.

Though most Americans don’t think of national parks as places where drilling happens, there are currently 534 oil and gas operations on 12 national park units, most of them in Texas or further east. The Park Service owns the surface but not the rights to the minerals below. The agency identified 30 other places in the national park system where future oil and gas development is possible because the resources are there and the mineral rights are owned privately or by states. The Western national parks on that list include New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, Wyoming’s Grand Teton, North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt and Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes and Mesa Verde. Other park service properties with so-called split estates and potential drilling include Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah and Arizona, Colorado’s Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site and Dinosaur National Monument and Fort Union Trading Post Historic Site in North Dakota and Montana."

Elizabeth Shogren reports for High Country News October 27, 2015.