Drilling stirs up changes in West

EDITOR'S NOTE — Soaring demand for natural gas and a Bush administration push to speed production are creating a new energy boom in the Rocky Mountain West. But times have changed since the oil shale boom of the '70s and '80s. People who moved to the mountains for the lifestyle are teaming up with ranchers to urge their communities and the government to put on the brakes. In a five-part series that begins today, The Associated Press examines the boom and its consequences.

RIFLE, Colo. — The Colorado River helped sculpt the deep brown mesas and pine-covered hills of western Colorado, home to Cathedral Bluffs and the soaring Roan Cliffs, their slopes falling swiftly to the valley floor.

More and more, this striking landscape is being reshaped by iron towers and earth-colored boxes, 6 feet tall. These are drilling rigs and well heads, signs of an underground natural gas reserve that industry experts say may be the biggest in the country — 21 trillion cubic feet of recoverable fuel, enough to heat 315 million homes for a year and a treasure worth billions of dollars.

Much of this gold mine is under Colorado's Roan Plateau, 127,000 acres in the heart of the Rockies — a region described last month by the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as "ground zero" in the Bush administration's plan to step up domestic energy development.

That plan has already led to social and economic changes across the high plains of Montana and Wyoming and the sagebrush-dotted deserts of New Mexico and Utah. Gas companies are hauling in drilling rigs, and crews are filling up the motels and restaurants of small towns desperate for the revenue.

The boom, however, is running into criticism from an unlikely alliance of hunters, ranchers, environmentalists and others who say energy companies are running amok, building roads and drilling wells without permission. Fights are breaking out over mineral rights involving ranchers who until now had been more familiar with cattle prices and winter wheat. Some have gone to court to keep the energy companies off their land.

Some of those who live in the West's far-flung reaches believe public land should be available for energy development. But they are calling for the government to put on the brakes, worried the new boom is threatening both the environment and the outdoors-based economy that has replaced the oil-and-gas days of the 1970s and '80s.

"We've seen this industry go boom and bust a couple times," said Peggy Utesch, a media consultant who lives in Silt, east of Rifle. "For people like us that live in this valley and probably will for the rest of our lives, that is a big concern."