A Sense of Deja Boom
PINEDALE--The word frenzy wouldn't really begin to describe what's going on in and around this county seat of 1,400, where active gas wells outnumber residents by almost 2 to 1. In Sublette County alone, more than a billion cubic feet of gas is being extracted every day. Just over the horizon from Mayor Rose Skinner's window at Town Hall, 40 drilling crews work around the clock, sending drill bits deep beneath the Jonah and Pinedale Gas Fields. Across a landscape that once served as a backdrop for Marlboro Man commercials, roughnecks install new roads and lay miles of heavy pipe. Shiny new pickups crowd busy Pine Street, and saloons like the Cowboy Bar & Lounge draw rowdy patrons every payday. "We're happy to ride this boom," says Mayor Skinner, 84, "as far as it'll take us."
Yet listen closely, and there's a forlorn quiver in her voice--indeed in the voices of many of this state's half-million hard-boiled residents. Dating back to the 1920s, there's never been an energy boom in Wyoming without a bust trailing behind it. The never-ending cycles are an enduring part of life here. Boom is better, no doubt about that. But folks in Pinedale know that even good times bring issues of their own. And while the getting's good, state leaders are searching for ways to get Wyoming off its economic roller coaster.
Memories of the last cycle are still vivid. The energy crisis of the late 1970s fueled an oil-drilling bonanza, but oil prices crashed in the mid-1980s and so did the state's economy; the bust lasted years. Wyoming ran a deficit of $200 million in 1999. Young people bolted. "Oh God," said a popular bumper sticker, "please give us one more boom. We promise not to piss the next one away."
The time has come to test that promise. New drilling technology, burgeoning demand for natural gas, and unexpectedly high prices began to turn things around in 2000. By the end of 2004, Wyoming, which had as few as 4,000 operating gas wells in the mid-1990s, was home to more than 21,000 producing wells. Over in the Powder River Basin near Gillette, geologists say there's an additional 25 trillion cubic feet of untapped commercial methane. Meanwhile, millions of tons of low-sulfur coal are being shipped by rail to power plants out East. Last year, Wyoming ran a surplus of $1 billion. In recent months, the Cowboy State has boasted one of the nation's lowest unemployment rates--3 to 4 percent--which hasn't happened since the early 1980s.
But even chamber-of-commerce types are feeling a bit unsettled as development leapfrogs from the Jonah Gas Field onto the Pinedale Anticline farther north. The anticline, a geological formation where new drilling is expected, has been called "the winter Serengeti of the lower 48," a reference to the 100,000 wild animals, including pronghorn antelope, elk, moose, grizzlies, wolves, and sage grouse, that converge there.
Perfuming the pig. The tension is evident in exchanges between Democratic Gov. Dave Freudenthal and the federal Bureau of Land Management, which administers mineral leasing on public and private lands in the West. BLM officials contend that energy development and the habitat needs of Wyoming's wildlife can be balanced, but at the Jonah Field, the governor's wildlife biologists have told him that the intensity of natural resource extraction has precluded the ability to safeguard imperiled species. "I would hope that the BLM would use the present circumstance [in the Jonah Field] as an example of what not to do in the future," Freudenthal wrote in an April letter to the agency. "To attempt to minimize any additional surface disturbance . . . is a futile attempt to 'perfume the pig.' "
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