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Drilling for oil, natural gas, and other resources is destroying our publicly owned lands, and wasting the taxpayer's money in the process.
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This is a photo of the Mega Borg spill from 1990, which spilled 5.1 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Photo courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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Click here for more links about drilling's impact on our public lands
Environmental Impact
- It is estimated that the oil industry loses approximately 280 million barrels per year through leaks, spills and other inefficiencies.
- Wellpads, pumpjacks, compressor stations, pipelines, and roads have transformed the face of many previously remote and wild areas of Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming into scarred and polluted industrial wastelands.
- The Bureau of Land Management anticipates that 50,000 wells could be drilled in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming. One current 5,000-well proposal would require 2,500 miles of roads with another 2,500 miles of pipelines. Additional roads will be required to access pipelines and compressor stations. These 5,000 wells threaten incredible devastation of 3,600 square miles of rural land, relatively much of which is federal public land. This is endemic of the drilling industry.
- Oil royalties paid below market rates place cleaner fuel sources at a market disadvantage, discouraging the development of new alternatives to fossil fuel energy. The burning of fossil fuels contributes to air pollution, smog, and global warming.
- Subsidizing the oil industry only encourages the development and misuse of the dirty fuels that promote these problems.
Financial Impact
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The financial return to the federal treasury for extraction of these public oil and gas reserves is
scandalously low. In spite of reclamation requirements, oil and gas wells are abandoned and left
for the taxpayers to clean up.
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According to the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS),
oil companies underpay royalties on the natural resources they extract from public lands by an estimated $66 million per year.
Although oil companies are supposed to pay a royalty based on percentages of gross production, the industry has used a "posted price"
which can differ by as much as $2 per barrel from the actual daily market price.
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Oil companies continue to underpay royalties every year. MMS
estimates that oil companies underpay royalties by at least $66 million per year, totaling a $856 million loss since 1991.
For information on the proposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
which has gained massive amounts of attention, click here.
We hope that you too will discover that our natural heritage is best kept Forever Wild,
and will be motivated to help us toward our goal.
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