Oil drilling possible in wilderness study areas

The Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration plans to auction land for oil and gas development in April, and where that land is located — and where the agency owns other land that could be leased or sold — makes environmentalists and conservationists cringe.

A dozen SITLA parcels slated for auction in April comprise 7,000 acres in five counties and are located, as SITLA puts it, "within an existing Bureau of Land Management Wilderness Reinventory Area" or within a BLM wilderness study area. A reinventory area means the land is a candidate for federal protection under a wilderness-study designation.

Despite the wilderness-study designations for lands that surround a SITLA lease parcel, an oil and gas operator can legally still drill on it.

The parcels were left over from SITLA's most recent lease sale last October. Nineteen parcels were posted as available through SITLA's so-called over-the-counter leasing (noncompetitive bidding) until Jan. 22. Parcels are nominated for leasing by the public, including oil and gas operators.

The January sale, in which sealed bids are made, is now planned for April because SITLA hopes higher prices will yield more money for the Utah public schools that share portions of the sale revenues with other state agencies. If oil and gas prices don't rebound by April, the sale could be postponed again, said LaVonne Garrison, SITLA's assistant director for oil and gas.

Stephen Bloch, an attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said this week that his group would fight any development of those lands that are surrounded by wilderness study areas.

"As far as the oil and gas leasing in wilderness study areas, the lessees know, or should know, what they're getting into and that SUWA will strongly oppose any and all steps by lessees to access and drill on these leases," he said in an e-mail to the Deseret News.

Garrison wouldn't speculate on why the 12 parcels didn't sell. Sometimes parcels won't receive bids, she said, because they're surrounded by protected federal lands, making access to the SITLA parcels difficult or impossible.

SITLA attorney Tom Mitchell said that in Utah, "it's a rare piece of state or private acreage that isn't close to or in the middle of an area of federal concern." About 1 million SITLA acres are surrounded by or close to areas with special federal designations that provide protection for tracts of land and its wildlife.

But Garrison said that a SITLA parcel has a sort of regulatory bubble over it that exempts it from the rules and regulations imposed by a federal designation such as "wilderness study area" on lands surrounding the SITLA parcels.