Monumental test awaits Trump's drilling plans

E&E News

19-05-2025

MOAB, Utah — Cane Creek units 26-2 and 26-3 might be on the most scenic oil and gas well pad in the country.
Red rock formations tower behind a pumpjack, and Arches National Park is visible along the horizon. Canyonlands National Park is a 15-minute drive away, and visitors can see the massive Green River Canyon from Dead Horse Point just up the road.
The well pad —which includes several storage tanks, compressors and pipes — sits in the Paradox Basin, one of Utah's oil -and gas-producing regions. Crews close to some of the country's most prized national parks are drilling for everything from heavy crude to lithium to potash, although the industrial sites in the area are few and far between compared to more prolific oil plays like northeastern Utah's Uinta Basin or Colorado's Denver-Julesburg Basin.
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Drilling equipment, fracking rigs and lithium wells could soon be a more common sight in Utah and other parts of the West. President Donald Trump has pledged to open more federal lands to oil, gas and mineral production — including land within current boundaries of national monuments and close to national parks. But the success of that push will depend on whether the U.S. can attract private investors to these sensitive sites as concerns about the economy and oil prices engulf the industry.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in February signed a secretarial order that requires the department's assistant secretaries to prioritize reducing barriers to the use of federal lands for energy development, as well as speed up the permitting process for drilling and offer more parcels of public land for oil and gas leasing.
On April 23, Burgum said he would slash the time requirement for reviewing environmental impact statements on federal oil and gas leases from two years to 28 days as part of Trump's announced 'energy emergency.' Also last month, Burgum said at an economic summit that federal bureaucracy and policies have prevented taxpayers and states from realizing the full potential of public lands.
'We have Western states that are being choked because they have so much public land, and there's so much overreach by the federal government and overlap between federal agencies and state agencies, that we're creating a suboptimal protection and suboptimal use of those public lands,' Burgum said.
Whether oil and gas companies will take the Trump administration up on offers of more federal leases is a different question.
'Who drills right next to a national park? Nobody likes that,' said Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution. 'No big oil company with name recognition is going to do that.'
Oil and gas association leaders told POLITICO's E&E News that operators are also reluctant to bid on federal oil and gas leases or undertake new drilling projects in general as the price of crude has declined after Trump on April 2 announced sweeping tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners. He later issued a 90-day pause on many of the new tariffs.
Companies are especially reluctant to lease federal lands near national monuments and parks, fearing bad publicity, legal challenges from environmental groups and a lack of infrastructure to get their product to market.
Rikki Hrenko-Browning, president of the Utah Petroleum Association, said the pendulum swings of policy between presidential administrations have created too much risk for oil and gas producers to risk bidding on leases in scenic and environmentally sensitive areas.
'I think you've seen a move not just here in Utah but nationally of production shopping for new permits that are away from federal lands,' Hrenko-Browning said. 'There are just more complex and time-consuming regulatory burdens that go into working with permitting on BLM [Bureau of Land Management] lands.'
The hesitancy of the oil and gas industry to bid on federal leases has raised questions from environmental groups about why Trump and Burgum would want to make available more federal leases near national monuments and parks.
'This doesn't add up,' said Beau Kiklis, associate director of the National Parks Conservation Association's Energy and Landscape Conservation Program. 'Why go after national monuments when there's no shortage of existing lands that could be made available?'
Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the White House, said in response to E&E News questions that Trump supports growing American energy production.
Trump received a 'mandate to unleash American energy and 'drill, baby, drill,' and it's already paying off — gas prices are down since he took office,' Kelly said in an email. 'This President will continue to restore American energy dominance and lower costs for families across the country.'
The Department of the Interior did not respond to questions and requests for comment.
'It's about the politics'
If the Interior Department's BLM offers leases near national parks, national monuments or within national forests, it wouldn't be the first time the agency did so under Trump.
BLM in 2019 proposed offering two oil and gas drilling parcels about a mile away from Arches — leases that would have taken up about two-thirds of the 10.5-mile Slickrock mountain bike trail. Then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke also proposed leases about 2 miles outside of Zion National Park in 2017.
Leases in Trump's first term were also proposed within a mile of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado, as were leases in New Mexico, Idaho and Montana that local groups argued would have harsh environmental impacts on sensitive areas. All of those leases were eventually walked back after pressure from local officials and environmental groups.
Trump in his second term, however, may be less willing to give in to pressure from local leaders and environmental groups.
The Lisbon Valley Copper Project, located outside Monticello, Utah, is shown. | Shelby Webb/POLITICO's E&E News
Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, said Trump has less resistance within his own Cabinet and in Congress, and has a backlog of policies he and other conservatives tried — and failed — to get across the finish line during his first term.
Rottinghaus said offering more leases for oil and gas, especially in environmentally sensitive or scenic areas, may not be a matter of trying to boost production even higher in the United States.
'It's about the politics — that's probably at least a big part of what's going on,' he said. 'The [Republican] base really cares about increasing production, and they also like the idea of this being something that the Biden administration wouldn't do and liberals don't like.'
Rottinghaus said that's symptomatic of what's known as affective polarization, a political science term for when polarization leads to tribalism in politics, where one party dislikes the other party so much they want to do things to hurt them politically or otherwise.
However, a majority of Republicans in eight Western states said Congress should place more emphasis on protecting water, air, habitat and recreation over responsible energy development on public lands, according to the 15th annual Conservation in the West Poll by Colorado College.
Overall, 72 percent of 3,316 voters polled in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming said they opposed or strongly opposed removing protections on some areas of existing national public lands, especially national monuments, to allow for more drilling and mining.
That included 54 percent of Republicans who said Congress should prioritize conservation over energy production. About 71 percent of those polled across all eight states and political parties said they support only allowing oil and gas companies the right to drill on public lands where there is a high likelihood they'll actually produce oil and gas.
Resource estimates
The U.S. Geological Survey periodically issues oil and gas assessments, estimating reserves of fossil fuels left in various parts of the country. Near most national parks and monuments, USGS has not found much.
Reservoirs in Wyoming and Montana — including the Bighorn and Wind River basins, which stretch from north of Yellowstone to southeast of Grand Teton National Park — were found to have 'little remaining undiscovered oil.' The Northwest Montana Bakken Formation, which includes the area surrounding Glacier National Park and is east of the park's boundary, could have an estimated 220 million barrels of oil — roughly the amount that could be churned out of the Permian Basin in less than 40 days, if the Permian produced as many average barrels a day as it did in June 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Other areas, however, have much more.
Dinosaur National Monument on the border of Utah and Colorado sits on the northeast corner of the Uinta Basin — an area responsible for more than 90 percent of Utah's oil production. Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota lies within the prolific Williston Basin, one of the largest oil production areas in the country.
In the Paradox Basin — which includes Arches, Canyonlands, Moab and Bears Ears, and Cane Creek units 26-2 and 26-3 — USGS officials estimated there were 560 million barrels of undiscovered oil in 2011.
Hydraulic fracturing rig No. B29 operates near Canyonlands National Park in Utah. | Shelby Webb/POLITICO's E&E News
Shortly after the USGS assessment, operators struck black gold.
Cane Creek Unit 12-1, located about 6 miles northeast of the northern boundary of Canyonlands National Park, suddenly became the most productive oil well in the state of Utah after it began producing in 2012.
At its peak in December of that year, the site churned out as much as 47,643 barrels of oil, and 19.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas, cumulatively over the 31-day period. The average onshore U.S. well in 2023 produced about 930 barrels of oil over 31 days, according to the EIA.
Cane Creek 12-1 was more productive than wells in the Uinta Basin, which is located in northeast Utah along the Colorado border.
Most of the area near Cane Creek 12-1 is federally owned, and the magnitude of that ownership is difficult to understand.
Utah ranks second among states for having the largest portion of its land owned by the federal government, behind Nevada. About 68 percent of Utah's land is managed by the federal government — an area collectively larger than the state of Illinois — according to the Utah Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office.
That ownership is evident in the region around Moab.
The land from just south of Moab to the Bears Ears monument looks almost completely vacant from Highway 191, empty of infrastructure and even roads, save for the small towns of Monticello and Blanding and some pockets of private property.
Redge Johnson, director of the Utah Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, said that's on purpose. Johnson said that the state's preference is to keep energy and mining infrastructure outside of the 'viewshed,' or all land that is visible from major highways and national parks.
'This is great,' Johnson said, gesturing south to the vast canyon and Green River that sit beneath Dead Horse Point State Park and Canyonlands National Park, and the public land that stretches as far as the eye can see. 'The state of Utah gives that two thumbs up — we want to protect it, and it's massive.
'But this flat land,' he said, turning back north to an area called the Big Flat where Cane Creek 12-1 sits, 'Here we want to slightly increase development so we can raise more money for our schools.'
While most of the pumpjacks and storage tanks on the Big Flat aren't visible from major roads, off of dirt roads managed by BLM, others aren't hard to find.
One well, extracting brine to pull lithium out of the liquid, sits near the Gemini Bridges off-highway vehicle trail. A hydraulic fracturing rig, towering several stories above the Big Flat, can be seen for miles from some vantage points.
It's not just the view impacts that most concern Kya Marienfeld, an attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. It's also the implications for the ecosystem.
'This is never going back to the way it was,' Marienfeld said, pointing to a well pad where crews leveled and cleared about an acre to accommodate drilling infrastructure. 'It's not like the Northwest where one rainy season washes it out and everything is fine.'
That's largely because of the biological soil crust that blankets almost all of Southeast Utah.
Cyanobacteria clumps together near a hydraulic fracturing rig in Southern Utah, forming biological soil crust. | Shelby Webb/POLITICO's E&E News
Tiny organisms like bacteria, algae, lichens and fungi bind together to form a cryptobiotic soil crust. That crust helps plants like juniper and pinyon pine take root and helps retain and hold water in place so the water doesn't all run off into creeks and canyons.
Marienfeld and others with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance worry that if too much of the soil crust is disturbed, it would be ruinous for the ecosystem. It can take years or decades for it to grow back, depending on the composition, according to the National Park Service.
'These monuments and lands are big because the purpose was to protect the whole ecosystem, the whole landscape,' Marienfeld said. 'If a step can ruin [the soil crust], any surface disturbance can. Nothing is light on the landscape out here.'
Even dirt roads leading to oil pads and cattle grazing can affect the landscape and ecosystem, she said.
Johnson, however, said land disturbances aren't just from the energy or herding industries in southern Utah. He pointed to Jeep off-roading tours and off-road camping permitted on federal lands.
'There's always a disturbance — there's fires, there's wildlife trails,' he said. 'There's just so much landscape, and already so much is protected.'
Lease sales and NEPA
Federal onshore lease sales have struggled to find bidders in the past few years.
Only 13 of the last 37 federal lease sales held by BLM from October 2020 through September 2024 saw companies bid on the total number of leases and acres that were offered by BLM, according to an E&E News review of federal leasing data. All but one of those sold-out lease sales offered fewer than 20 parcels.
Gross with the Brookings said she expects demand for federal oil and gas parcels to remain weak this year, largely thanks to oil markets.
The price of oil has remained below $70 a barrel for U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate since early April.
And oil and gas companies told the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in their first quarter of 2025 Energy Survey that they need oil prices to be around $65 a barrel in order to profitably drill a new well.
'I think the idea within the administration is that they can have both low oil prices and more production if they cut regulation and fees,' Gross said. 'That assumption they're operating on, I don't buy it. I don't think they understand that those goals [of low prices and higher production] don't go together.'
Gross also questioned the usefulness of offering up leases near national parks and monuments when other tracts are available.
Where oil and gas lease parcels are located is dictated by BLM and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA).
That act directs BLM on how to divvy up parcels of federal land for multiple uses, including recreation, environmental production, mining, and oil and gas leasing. Swaths of federal land are broken up under resource management plans, which dictate where certain activities — from hunting to fracking — can happen.
Those plans can be amended, following FLPMA and the National Environmental Policy Act, said Jason Hill, an attorney specializing in natural resources at the Holland & Knight law firm. The Obama administration used this process to try to restrict hunting and fishing on some federal lands, for example, reallocating more parcels for recreation purposes, Hill said.
Prior to 2020, a White House Council of Environmental Quality study found it would take an average of 4.5 years to finalize EISes and issue records of decisions for proposed changes to federal resource management plans.
During Trump's first term, Zinke signed a secretarial order requiring the NEPA compliance process take no longer than 12 months for projects requiring a full EIS.
Then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke talks to reporters before departing Kanab Airport on May 10, 2017, in Kanab, Utah. | George Frey/AFP via Getty Images
Congress ultimately passed a statute limiting that timeline to two years in 2023, but Burgum said recently that the department would implement emergency permitting procedures to shorten that timeline to 28 days.
'In practice I think the agencies are still in a situation where they haven't fully caught up where the law is on timelines for conducting NEPA,' Hill said. 'These things don't take so long because someone is working on it for two years, it's because someone on the field-level works for six weeks, then it sits on various people's desks for two years, waiting for them to review it.'
The most recent timeline change could allow the administration to change the use of federal lands much more quickly, Hill said.
Then there's the potential shrinking of national monuments, and the potential that the Trump administration offers some of the land in their previous, larger borders up for oil and gas leasing.
Presidents can create national monuments thanks to the 1906 Antiquities Act, but the semantics and applications of that law have been debated since Trump's first term, Hill said.
During the first Trump administration, officials moved to shrink the size of some national monuments, including reducing the size of the Bears Ears monument by a third. His administration and those in favor of opening up more public lands for leasing say his actions were in line with the Antiquities Act, which says monuments' borders should be confined to 'the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.'
But Hill said Trump's use of the act raised another legal question: Once a national monument is established, does another president have the right to shrink its boundaries?
'This was teed up in the first Trump administration, but then you had a change of administration in between, and the shrinking and reexpansion of those boundaries,' Hill said. 'And all those court cases involving these questions went away as moot and were not resolved by courts.'
If Trump seeks to shrink the monuments again, he would dredge up legal questions and court battles.
For many, the prospect of drilling near these monuments and near national parks carries too many unknowns.
Hrenko-Browning said operators have to contend with shifting goalposts for environmental regulations, federal insurance regulations, federal rulemakings, lease decisions and NEPA requirements — 'they all add up together.'
'I think everyone is waiting to see where the dust settles. This administration is much friendlier towards the oil and gas industry,' Hrenko-Browning said. 'That being said, if we go back to this pendulum swing, we've got four years of the Trump administration, and then uncertainty comes next. If history tells us anything, the pendulum [between policy extremes] is swinging more with each administration change.'
Kathleen Sgamma, outgoing president of the Western Energy Alliance and a Trump nominee to lead BLM who pulled her name from consideration earlier this year, said developing in national parks and monuments is a nonstarter for the industry.
'When you look at national parks and national monuments, of course nobody is talking about developing in those,' Sgamma said. 'But a national park does not confer an additional boundary area. Often groups suggest there's this additional boundary around certain things. The agencies consider whether it's an appropriate setting for leasing or not.'
Sgamma suggested that environmental groups could gain more traction — and donations — by floating the specter that pumpjacks near Arches National Park could soon be a reality. But Kiklis with the National Parks Conservation Association said the threat of more leases in environmentally sensitive and prized areas is more existential than a handful of leases.
'I think this is being done under the guise of energy development,' Kiklis said. 'This is about dismantling our public lands institutions, our access to public lands in a move to find ways to sell these lands off.'