Short-Term Memory Loss

Wyoming wants to send us a surprise.  A hearing is scheduled Thursday before U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer in Cheyenne over a case to invalidate water quality rules for southeast Montana rivers. The case, brought by Marathon Oil and Devon Energy against Montana and the EPA, seeks once again, to dismiss numerical water quality standards imposed by the Montana Board of Environmental Review (BER) in 2003. The companies claim that the standards “put a crimp on drilling in Montana and neighboring Wyoming”. Awww…

BLM predicts that Wyoming will see 50,000 to 120,000 new CBM wells in the next 15-20 years. Each well will pump water out of coal seams at a rate of up to 100 gallons per minute and produce 20 tons of salt per year. Gas companies figure that the most economical way to handle that ludicrous amount of salty water is to just pour it into the nearest drainage and let it flow north into Montana. Montana disagrees. The salt water wreaks havoc with irrigated land. Pumping prodigious amounts of water dries up irrigation and stock wells from nearby farmers and ranchers. Along with the wells comes thousands of miles of roads and pipelines, thousands of wastewater ponds, and millions of acres of destroyed wildlife habitat.

Not that we don’t trust our neighbor to the south to protect us from polluted water flowing north but, a recent report by the Wyoming Environmental Quality Council found that the “Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality is an embarrassment to the state…” for ignoring science and continuing to issue “permits that allow too much sodium and salt in coal-bed methane discharge water for agricultural use“.

The courts have consistently upheld Montana’s water quality rules and our right to institute those rules.  In 2007, District Judge Blair Jones upheld Montana standards for electrical conductivity (EC) and sodium adsorption ratio (SAR) in a suit by four methane gas companies.

“Jones rejected each of the five claims industry lawyers offered in attempting to overturn the numeric water quality standards. He found that the BER acted properly when it determined enforceable numeric standards were needed to regulate methane development and that the state was warranted in taking proactive measures to protect water quality.“

Industry lawyers argued that Montana should wait until actual damage was done before instituting such strict standards. That’s a bit like waiting until the plane crashes to fix the broken fuel pump.

In 2008 the federal government again approved the Montana standards to protect state rivers from downstream pollution. Gas producers and the state of Wyoming filed suit over the rules after negotions between the two states collapsed last year. The president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming called the Montana standards “ridiculously low“. Something is certainly ridiculous here and it ain’t Montana’s attempt to maintain it’s clean water. These guys will never learn.