January 28, 2003

By Becky Bohrer

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Arizona Daily Star Online

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SPOTTED HORSE, Wyoming - A few weeks back, an unfamiliar pickup truck pulled up at Mike Foate's ranch and two men stepped out as if they owned the place.

In a way, he soon found out, they did.

The men were from a company that holds rights to mineral reserves under Foate's Rocking Horse Ranch, where city slickers pay for the peace and quiet. The men were there to survey places to drill. The company, Foate learned, is gearing up for what many expect to be full-throttle drilling for coal-bed methane in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana.

Foate felt sick as the two men's words sank in. He ordered them off his land until he could talk to a lawyer.

"We just never realized that could happen," said Foate, who said he was unaware when he bought the ranch 10 years ago that the minerals underneath belonged to someone else.

Sometime early this year, the U.S. government is expected to lift a moratorium that has halted new drilling for coal-bed methane in much of the region for the past two years.

Landowners like Foate with "split estates" are getting worried they will be overwhelmed with developers' demands for access to their land. Split estates are common in the West; the rancher owns the land, or "surface rights," but someone else owns the minerals, oil or gas beneath it.

Many ranchers fear that giving developers access to drill will mean new roads, mazes of power lines and large holding ponds for the wastewater extracted during the drilling. They wonder if their land will ever look the same once the companies leave.

The Powder River Basin covers an estimated 13 million acres of craggy buttes and rolling prairie in northern Wyoming and southeastern Montana. Underneath lie rich deposits of methane gas in the coal seams.

How that gas is tapped has been the focus of a long feud pitting some landowners and environmentalists against gas developers and the federal government, which controls mineral rights in a large portion of the basin and leases those rights to companies that do the drilling.

Farmers and ranchers say the water released during the drilling can be high in salt or metals that can damage crops and kill trees. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming stopped issuing new drilling permits in much of the state in August 2000 because of those concerns, and Montana ended all new drilling a few months earlier because of a conservation group's lawsuit.

In early January, though, the government released an environmental review of coal-bed methane drilling, recommending stronger protections for rivers and streams but essentially clearing the way for tens of thousands of new wells.

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