KDNK reporter Amy Hadden Marsh interviews Peter Hart from Wilderness Workshop, a non-profit organization that helps protect the wilderness, water, and wildlife of western Colorado’s public lands, about the leasing of the Roan Plateau.
Amy Hadden Marsh: Catch us up on the history of protecting the Roan Plateau.
Peter Hart: It's a long story with a lot of history. Initially, it was the Naval Oil Shale Reserve, and then it was transferred to the Department of the Interior. And then during the Bush administration, they decided that they were gonna open it to oil and gas leasing, which then began a long controversy, a lot of public opposition to drilling up there.
It's amazing country. It's one of the most biodiverse areas in the state. Huge herds of deer and elk rely on the area, so there are a lot of sportsmen who love to go up there. And there are also rare fish in the creeks, and there are some amazing creeks and some huge waterfalls, some of the biggest waterfalls in the state.
And it's this towering monolith of a plateau that sits 3,000 feet above Rifle. It's the most notable and scenic thing that you notice as you drive I-70 between Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction.
So anyway, when the Bush administration decided they wanted to lease it, there was a huge amount of public controversy about that. And they did ultimately lease it, at which point Wilderness Workshop and a number of other conservation groups and sportsmen groups filed a lawsuit led by Earthjustice, and ultimately won, challenging the Bush leasing plans and their decisions to issue those leases. That legal victory was then appealed by industry, which paved the way for a settlement that happened around 2012, which closed most of the top of the Roan Plateau to future leasing, and actually canceled most of the leases that had been previously sold during the early Bush years.
There were two leases that were left on top of the plateau at that point as part of that settlement agreement; 90% of the top of the Roan was protected through that settlement, but there were two leases that remained up there. Subsequently, those leases were relinquished by that company–that was pretty recently–that was only a few years ago. They basically held onto those leases, but they never developed them.
And our hope was that without leases atop the Roan, there might be opportunities to achieve stronger protections for the whole area. But, the Trump administration has different plans. So now there are two expressions of interest that the BLM has received and is including, I guess proposing, to sell two leases up there as part of the December 2026 lease sale. So we're now in a position where we're back at the beginning, fighting new oil and gas leases on top of the Roan Plateau.
Marsh: Does this threat to the Roan come as a surprise?
Hart: No, unfortunately it doesn't come as a surprise. We're in the midst of a full-on leasing frenzy on public lands. I think the September sale was 170,000 acres of public land statewide, and the December sale is going to be 130,000. So these are some of the biggest lease sales that we've seen in the state in the historical context.
They're certainly the biggest sales that we've seen in a long time, especially in Western Colorado, where we just didn't have a lot of leasing for the last decade. Basically, in the early 2000s up until 2010, there was a lot of leasing, there was a lot of drilling, there was a lot of activity in the Piceance Basin, and then it just tapered. And there wasn't a lot of leasing; every year there were fewer and fewer rigs, and now we're back to that frenzy, maybe even a Bush administration plus when it comes to the amount of oil and gas leasing.
Marsh: Talk a little bit more about the difference between what you're facing with the Trump administration in trying to protect the plateau compared to what happened during the Bush administration.
Hart: The frenzy is similar. I hesitate to say that the Bush administration played by all the rules because there was some nefarious stuff that happened during that process. But this administration has got the energy dominance agenda and, in addition to that, this sort of deregulatory agenda that's intent on changing the rules.
So not only are we seeing an extraordinary amount of oil and gas leasing, but we're also seeing them rewrite the rules and basically write the public out of the process. And they're doing that in a way that is much more aggressive than anything that we saw during the Bush administration. We saw the Bush administration implement some additional categorical exclusions and things like that, that would expedite analysis or reduce the amount of analysis that was gonna be necessary. But they were playing within the same rule book, and this administration is burning the rule book and trying to create their own.
