Eckels is vice-president of Wind River Resources Corp., a Salt Lake City-based company that typically drills four to five wells a year in the Book Cliffs area in Uintah County. He believes the $4,000 fee is a "good idea."

"Part of the problem for everybody is a lot of companies apply for hundreds of permits at once; it creates the bottleneck," said Eckels. "This way, you will have to be halfway serious before applying."

One thing that Stringer said is clear is that numbers will be driven by economics.

"If the price is up, the APDs (applications to drill) will come in. If the price goes down, the number of APDs will go down, but they won't go away," he said.

So far this year several permits have been submitted to the Vernal office along with the required $4,000 fee, said Stringer, adding that payment of the fee doesn't mean that the most recent requests will be put on the top of the pile.

"The addition of this fee didn't change anything as far as priorities are concerned. Just because you paid a fee of $4,000 after the 26th (of December) doesn't mean you move to the front of the line. It is business as usual," he said.

There's no question that the fee adds a new layer of paperwork to agencies already drowning in it, but Stringer said while it will be inconvenient, his employees can handle it.

"We have to set up these accounts, we have to track this money, be sure it comes in," he said. "It's another duty of the day — I really wasn't looking for anymore, but I doubt this will break us."

The good news is that the state isn't going to be following suit by implementing a processing fee for applications to drill on state land, said Jim Springer, public information officer for the Utah Division of Oil, Gas & Mining.

"Utah's oil and gas program does not have an impact fee but we do have a severance tax and we basically collect what the BLM does," Springer said.

The Utah Tax Commission actually collects the tax and it is distributed to the division for use as needed to offset the cost of processing oil and gas applications.

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E-mail: lezleewhiting@hotmail.com