MOAB — Two environmental groups say the Bureau of Land Management was wrong to approve a natural gas collector line network north of Moab and officially filed an appeal challenging the decision.
Both the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Sierra Club say the planned pipeline system on public lands near Dead Horse Point State Park and Island in the Sky area of Canyonlands National Park should have been considered in conjunction with the main pipeline that went in, the Dead Horse Lateral.
“BLM’s decision to consider Fidelity’s gathering pipeline system in isolation, and not take into account the environmental impacts from other projects necessary to make the gathering system work, is a textbook violation of environmental laws,” said Landon Newell, staff attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “As a result, BLM significantly underplayed the impacts from swelling oil and gas development in this remarkable landscape.”
The gathering system that has been proposed by Fidelity Exploration & Production will only be able to operate once connected to the Dead Horse Lateral, which is a $70 million, 24-mile pipeline built to convey the natural gas captured from the flaring at the well sites.
Fidelty bought up existing leases to the oil wells in the Big Flat area in 2007 and advents in drilling technology have sparked an accelerated pace of oil and gas activity opposed by environmental groups.
In 2013, the wells at Big Flat flared enough natural gas to heat 236,000 homes, leading to the decision to cap the natural gas and convey it in a pipeline for eventual processing at a plant.
The groups' appeal was filed Friday with the BLM's Salt Lake City office.
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