The borders of the Lewistown Project Planning Area enclose a massive geographic area of more than 20,000 square miles, stretching from the granite cliffs of the Rocky Mountain Front to the semi-arid plains of central Montana

Within this single administrative region lies more than 650,000 acres of public lands administrated by the Bureau of Land Management, much of it consisting of scattered tracts intermingled with private and state lands. Equally important is the planning area's federal mineral estate 1.2 million acres of subsurface resources administrated by the BLM for the benefit of the American people.

On Valentines Day 2020, the BLM released its proposed Resource Management Plan (RMP) for the Lewistown area, a four-volume document detailing how the agency will prioritize its management of the area's land, water, wildlife and mineral resources in the decades to come. The RMP was immediately and forcefully criticized by environmental organizations for its realignment of priorities, placing more emphasis on expanding resource extraction opportunities than preserving landscape conservation practices.

“One week ago, Acting BLM Director William Perry Pendley claimed in an op-ed that the BLM is ‘serving public interest in multiple use,’" said Mike Penfold, the former Montana state director of the BLM in a news release issued the same day as the Lewistown RMP. "That’s utter hogwash. This RMP makes a mockery of the BLM’s multiple-use mandate and serves no one’s interest except that of the oil and gas industry.”

Environmentalists take exception to several provisions within in the new RMP. Among them are the BLM's decision to not include any of the 27 stream segments nominated for inclusion within the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, eliminating protections on six of the eight areas previously designated as being of critical environmental concern (ACECs), and offering no additional protections for the 200,000 acres the BLM identified in 2016 as having wilderness characteristics.

Their sharpest criticism, however, has been leveled at the potential of unfettered development of oil and gas reserves within the federal mineral estate.

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"While the RMP does not sell off public lands, it does something worse," said Aubrey Bertram, eastern Montana field director for the Montana Wilderness Association. "It hands our public lands over to oil and gas companies for pennies on the dollar at the expense of everything we hold dear about these lands."

At a news conference on March 19, Bertram and other critics of the 2020 RMP noted that 91% of the mineral estate managed by the BLM within the Lewistown planning area will be available for oil and gas leasing; and the surface development that entails, including road building and drilling rig construction.

"We depend on the Lewistown planning area for hunting, fishing, camping and so many other kinds of outdoor recreation," said Justin Schaff, an avid hunter from the Fort Peck area. "By selling out this area to oil and gas, Interior Secretary Bernhardt and BLM Director Pendley have made it clear that they don't care at all about what these public lands mean to us or our way of life."

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Many people would disagree with Schaff's assessment of the proposed RMP.

Conservatives applauded in 2017 when President Trump unveiled his policy of "Energy Dominance;" the goal being to make the United States not just energy independent, but for the country to become the world's leading producer and a net exporter of fossil fuels in the years ahead.

“Achieving American energy dominance begins with recognizing that we have vast untapped domestic energy reserves," said former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in laying out the President's energy policy. "For too long America has been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry. The Department is committed to an America-first energy strategy.”

To achieve those aims, the administration slashed regulations related to energy production and environmental protection, authorized drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and is in the processes of opening up virtually all federal waters to oil and natural gas production.

In 2018, the BLM changed its oil and gas leasing policy to limit public comment and environmental reviews, accelerate permitting, and expand leasing. The process of drafting a new RMP for the Lewistown area, which began in February 2014, fell squarely in the middle of this seismic shift.

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"That work was shelved," Tracy Stone Manning of the National Wildlife Federation said of an early draft of the Lewistown Area RMP. "Years of work was just simply cast aside. It is really concerning that the public is not being listened to or heard to the extent it should be. It's a trend that people should be alarmed about."

"This is an administration that has specifically slashed public comment periods on oil and gas lease sales, has pushed through oil and gas sales as a priority for our BLM offices, and is actually trying to lease as much public land as possible into private hands," Bertram added.

However, you can't pump oil from a landscape where it doesn't exist.

While the Trump administration's boosterism for the oil and gas industry will almost certainly lead to an increase in drilling on a national scale, drilling in the Lewistown area has been sluggish over the last 30 years due in large part to its lack of proven reserves.

A 2014 BLM report on oil and gas resources reports that oil production peaked in the Lewistown area in the mid-1980s when roughly 650,000 barrels of crude and 3 million cubic meters of natural gas were being produced annually. Within the last decade, production totals have dropped to just a fraction of their mid-80s highs.

That same BLM report found that only 22% of the 1.2 million-acre mineral reserve within the Lewistown area had a "moderate" potential for future oil and gas development. Nearly all of that is in and around existing fields in Teton, Pondera and Petroleum counties.

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"Anticipated activity will be tied to exploration for new field discoveries, and most of these townships will not not receive any drilling at all," the BLM report concluded. "If a new field discovery is made in any of these areas of very low or negligible development potential, subsequent drilling density could increase moderately around that discovery."

In short, there doesn't seem to be a lot of there, there.

Much of the environmental community's concerns are focused upon the antiquated means through which oil and gas companies obtain the right to drill on public lands.

In the United States the award of private contracts to extract coal, oil, natural gas, other hydrocarbons from public lands is governed by Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. Under the Mineral Leasing Act, public lands are leased through competitive auctions.

The process is largely anonymous, with companies nominating the parcels of land they would like to see included in each lease sale. Producers of oil or natural gas who win a competitive bid are required to pay a royalty of at least 12.5 percent of the value of oil or gas removed, in addition to annual rental fees.

Parcels that go without any bids are then available for an off-the-shelf purchase. These are frequently bought by speculators, who can obtain an oil or gas lease for the 1920s bargain-basement price of $1.50 an acre plus an administrative fee of around $75.

The failure of Congress to modernize a law, which was drafted when fewer than a quarter of Americans owned a motorized vehicle, has been a major concern of environmentalists for a generation.

"Just because there is little to no potential for development in an area hasn't stopped anyone from obtaining these non-competitive leases," Bertram said. "Companies can use those leases to bolster the rest of their portfolio. It still leaves lands at risk of private control."

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"Why are we allowing places to be managed for private interests when those interests - scientifically, geologically - really don't exist?" she continued. "These are areas which have such critical value for wildlife, for recreation and all of the other values that our public lands provide."

"That's the real issue here," Petrich added. "Maybe those areas (with proven oil and gas reserves) are the only ones that should be open to bidding, and everything else should be managed for a better use."

Ted Brewer, representing the Montana Wilderness Association, said that a coalition of conservation organizations are petitioning Montana's Congressional delegation to support legislation that would reform the nation's oil and gas leasing system and put an end to non-competitive leasing.

David Murray is Natural Resources/Outdoors reporter for the Great Falls Tribune. To contact him with comments or story ideas; email at dmurray@greatfallstribune.com or call (406) 791-6574. To support his work,subscribe today and get a special offer.