Chief Mountain drilling leases come as big surprise
Citizens concerned about oil and gas development in the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park were surprised last week to discover nine blocks of oil leases abutting the Park’s eastern boundary at Chief Mountain.
Two of the leased blocks run through the summit of the 9,080-foot iconic peak about five miles south of the Canada Border along Highway 17. Records of the leases were held by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The five-year leases, held by Nations Energy LLC, are dated from May and cover 6 1/4 square miles of reservation land. The company has permission to drill up to three wells, but no application or plans for drilling or environmental analysis accompany the records.
Both watchdog citizens and Glacier Park officials were unaware of the leases until last week. An exploratory well was drilled many years ago near Chief Mountain on its eastern flank, but the mountain is also considered sacred by Indians.
The largest player in the recent oil and gas drilling activity on the reservation, Anschutz Exploration Corp., announced in March it was discontinuing drilling. The company holds about 600,000 acres of leases on the west side of the reservation and had drilled 14 wells.
Meanwhile, south of Browning in the Badger-Two Medicine area, a Louisiana-based oil company that has held 6,247 acres in leases there since 1982 has filed a lawsuit claiming the federal government is unfairly preventing the company from exploratory drilling.
Solenex LLC claimed decades of illegal delay measures in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. The company had received drilling permits for the Hall Creek area four times in the 1980s and early 1990s before permit approval was suspended four times in the 1990s. Approval suspension in 1998 has been indefinite, the lawsuit claims.
Permit approval was suspended in 1993, the company says, after Sen. Max Baucus introduced a bill mandating a review of the Badger-Two Medicine Area in accordance with the Wilderness Act. Interior Sec. Bruce Babbitt later instituted a moratorium on drilling in the area that expired in 1996.
Drilling was also delayed by a cultural-historical review of the area under the National Historic Preservation Act, the lawsuit says. In 1997, the Lewis and Clark National Forest declared federal land on the Rocky Front off limits to future drilling, but the Hall Creek leases were grandfathered in.
Solenex sent a letter to Lewis and Clark National Forest supervisor Bill Avey and Bureau of Land Management state director Jamie Connell on May 21 requesting that the suspension be lifted so the company could begin exploratory drilling. The company says Avey’s response did not indicate a time when the suspension would be lifted, the company says.