Although the administration hopes to use this report to support its efforts to make oil and gas drilling the dominant use of public land and to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other sensitive natural areas to oil and gas drilling, a careful reading of the EPCA Phase II report reveals it to be a transparent and misleading attempt to support a pro-industry drilling agenda.

Ironically, this report has not significantly changed the conclusions of the original EPCA report. For the Rocky Mountain region, in the Phase I (2003) report, only 17% of the oil and 14% of the gas were “off limits” to development.  In today’s Phase II report, just 13% of the oil and 14% of the gas are off limits.

However, the administration has moved a lot of oil and gas into the “available with restrictions” category from the “available with standard stipulations” category – essentially leaving the same percentages of the oil (87%) and natural gas (86%) available for development, despite the fact that they have removed a lot of “proved reserves” from their estimates of available resources because they are currently under development.

The report’s other misleading approaches include:

• assuming that leasing stipulations to protect wildlife are rarely waived, when in reality the BLM waives these stipulations all the time;
• categorizing areas now undergoing land-use planning or not having plans as “off limits”  -- which is contrary to both fact and policy;
• ignoring the economic constraints on production.

As background, in 2003 the Department of Interior issued the first EPCA report, which found industry has access to more than 80 and 85 percent of the oil and gas resources underlying federal lands in the Rocky Mountains. Because that finding was not useful to the oil and gas industry, which has pressed relentlessly for leases to extract more oil and gas from our public lands, industry lobbied hard to revise and reissue the report.

The results will be used to “ensure that any constraints in place or proposed are the most appropriate and effective for managing all the resources of the area and not posing barriers to oil and gas production unless it is absolutely necessary for the preservation of other resources present on the land.” (Q&A, p. 9)

“This is another biased report from a discredited administration that views laws protecting clean air, water and wildlife not as beneficial, but only as impediments to their allies in oil and gas industry,” said The Wilderness Society’s Pete Morton.