Public Waters by Anne MacKinnon

Author:Anne MacKinnon [MacKinnon, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780826362421
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, the role of the state engineer in Wyoming water management had been changing, in response to a variety of pressures.

In the mid-1990s, anxiety gripped Wyoming and reached the State Engineer’s Office. It was worry over limited prospects, fear that Wyoming would again see the kind of subsistence incomes and strapped state budgets that characterized Wyoming for most of its history. State income had become dependent on revenues from coal, oil, and natural gas, but as their market prices dropped and oil production declined, it was the end of the halcyon days of the 1970s and early 1980s, when mineral money poured into state coffers, including into water development funds. At the end of the 1990s, state officials forecast a budget deficit, and a blue-ribbon committee dared to recommend that Wyoming adopt an income tax for the first time. State income tax was anathema to Wyoming residents long used to mineral bounty.7

In the late 1990s, however, a new kind of mineral production arose that promised the kind of revenue that would save the state from seriously contemplating that step. Natural gas (methane) can be found trapped in coal seams, and a couple of laid-off oil company staffers developed a reliable and cheap way of producing it—getting enough gas from the seventy-foot thick coal seams in the Powder River basin in northeast Wyoming to make a good profit. Someone with just a water-well drilling setup could get down into unmined coal seams to get methane. By 1997, the volume of “coalbed methane” (CBM) being produced in the Powder River basin appeared to be on its way to doubling in the next year. And when final figures came in, it had done better than that.8

There were water issues associated with this minerals boom. Coal seams in the Powder River basin are aquifers, and it is water pressure that keeps the methane in the coal; to get methane out of the coal, the water must be pumped out first. From the thick coal seams in the Powder River basin, that can mean a lot of water. In 1997, Jeff Fassett, state engineer during the most contentious years of adjudicating the tribes’ rights on the Wind-Big Horn River, was still in office, and he had a decision to make on CBM. Typically, the State Engineer’s Office does not supervise oil and gas operation production of water; it’s often in small amounts, sometimes used nearby. But as CBM and its water production grew, with potential impact on groundwater supplies, Fassett decided that pumping groundwater in order to produce CBM should come under State Engineer’s Office supervision. To do that, he ruled that pumping groundwater for CBM should be considered a beneficial use of water. Some people objected to the idea that simply pumping water up to get at another resource could be considered a beneficial use of the water itself. But the alternative appeared to be letting the state agency that managed oil and gas production be the sole authority in questions of the groundwater impacts of CBM production.

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