BLM pulling parcels out of oil-gas sale

The Bureau of Land Management is pulling 30 parcels of land in Emery County out of an oil and gas lease sale scheduled for Feb. 21.

Located in the San Rafael Desert and Labyrinth Canyon near the Green River, the parcels have an area of 55,000 acres, said Don Banks, spokesman for the BLM's Utah headquarters in Salt Lake City.

They were among 109 parcels totaling 172,095 acres that the agency was considering placing on the auction block in its quarterly lease sale. Most are in land administered by the BLM's Vernal and Price field office.

Environmentalists protested more than 100,000 acres of the sale as originally proposed. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Natural Resources Defense Council and Grand Canyon Trust were concerned about solitude and other values on the disputed tracts, said SUWA.

Land in the San Rafael Desert region between the San Rafael Reef and the Green River, where parcels were proposed for sale, was part of a wilderness proposal advanced by environmentalists. Congress did not designate the land as wilderness and, under a deal between the state and the Interior Department, the areas were no longer considered as potential wilderness.

Banks said the BLM has been examining "the merits of those protests." On Wednesday it made a final determination to pull the 30 parcels, he said.

"We have decided that some of the parcels we have identified will be withdrawn from this sale to give us some extra time to check into some of the details" of the situation. The BLM needs to feel confident about its decision to lease, he said.

A reason for the withdrawal is a possible conflict with a draft land-use plan that the BLM is working on, he said.

"We will defer leasing" on the 30 parcels, Banks added. "We'll continue to look at those parcels and we'll look to offer them in a future sale."

Besides concerns about solitude in the desert, impact on archaeological resources was cited by the environmentalists. Adrienne Babbitt, spokeswoman for the BLM, said earlier that BLM rules require protection of cultural resources if leases are issued.

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