Wyo. BLM defers leasing in Adobe Town area

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management said Wednesday that it was deferring the auction of controversial oil and gas leases in the high desert Adobe Town area in southwest Wyoming.

The bureau's Wyoming office said that it is seeking guidance from the office in Washington, D.C., on "wilderness issues" and won't offer the 15 parcels at an auction in Cheyenne on Dec. 1.

Groups including the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance and Wyoming Outdoor Council had protested the auctioning of the leases. They pointed out that state and local officials oppose drilling in the Adobe Town area.

Mary Wilson, a BLM spokeswoman in Cheyenne, said the bureau deferred the leases not in response to environmentalists' concerns but because BLM headquarters has been "fine-tuning" guidelines for how to manage wilderness-type areas.

"We want to make sure if that guidance is imminent, we don't want to step outside of it before it's issued," she said.

Adobe Town, a remote desert badlands with colorful mazes of narrow canyons, is home to a variety of animals including burrowing owls and ferruginous hawks, the largest hawk species in North America.

The Wyoming Environmental Quality Council has designated nearly 300 square miles encompassing Adobe Town as a "very rare or uncommon" area. The Sweetwater County Commission has adopted a resolution recommending no future leasing in the southern two-thirds of that area, including those proposed for leasing.

"This is a great decision by the administration to pull back from a commitment of some our most fragile and spectacular landscapes to industrial developments," said Erik Molvar, of the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance. "Perhaps this is a sign that the new administration is going to be listening to local governments like the Sweetwater County Commission in ways that the previous administration did not."

A gas industry group said the decision to defer is another case of obstruction of leases by the Interior Department under the Obama administration.

"This is another example where the Department of Interior is restricting access to Americans' natural gas and oil without due process and without consideration of the multiple uses of public land," said Kathleen Sgamma, director of government affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States.

The BLM "arbitrarily expanded" the border of the 86,000-acre Adobe Town Wilderness Study Area near the proposed leasing area by deferring the leasing, she said.

The deferred leases cover about 23 square miles. Fifty-eight leases are still scheduled for auction, including 17 leases in areas identified as core sage grouse habitat by Gov. Dave Freudenthal's executive order. Environmentalists oppose those leases as well.

The decision to withdraw the Adobe Town leases "made sense" and state officials expect to remain in touch with the BLM about the proposed leasing in sage grouse habitat, said Ryan Lance, deputy chief of staff to Freudenthal.