Salazar says Interior, EPA coming together to speed gas projects

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Thursday that his department and the Environmental Protection Agency are working jointly to curb bureaucratic delays holding up onshore natural gas drilling projects while ensuring that energy companies use strong pollution safeguards.

Salazar said the federal agencies and a subsidiary of Anadarko Petroleum Corp. have reached an agreement under which the company will use enhanced air-pollution controls on a project that will include up to 3,675 new gas wells in Utah’s Uinta Basin.

“Companies deserve certainty and clarity just as the American people need clean energy and they also need clean air,” Salazar told reporters on a conference call.

He noted that Interior’s Bureau of Land Management and EPA have in the past taken different approaches to air quality issues with gas drilling proposals, but said their agreement on the Greater Natural Buttes Area Gas Development Project in Utah signals a sea change.

Salazar announced a step forward in the proposed project that sounds mundane — an air quality supplement to the draft environmental impact statement — but one he called a template that will provide a model to guide other projects.

“There are some critical lessons here that are important for us to move forward with and institutionalize, so that we can move forward with other projects around the country,” Salazar said.

He said that BLM and EPA are crafting a formal memorandum of understanding about how to review and resolve air quality issues related to oil-and-gas development on public lands.

BLM Director Bob Abbey said ensuring strong controls on the proposed new drilling in Utah — which he said would disturb an additional 8,000 acres — are vital due to air quality problems in the region.

“In places like Vernal, Utah where winter time ozone levels can sometimes be among the highest in the country, in part due to oil and gas development, we must be especially vigilant that such projects proceed the right manner and with the right mitigation,” he said in a statement.

The project, first proposed in 2006, has been delayed in part over air-pollution concerns, according to Interior.

The Uintah Basin region experienced 23 days in the first two months of 2011 in which ozone pollution exceeded acceptable levels, according to Interior, and five days that were considered “very unhealthy.”

The thousands of new wells planned for the Utah project could produce up to 6 trillion cubic feet of gas over 10 years, according to Interior.