CHEYENNE - The Nature Conservancy and BP America Production Co. in Wyoming have joined forces to develop a new computer program designed to help energy companies mitigate the effects of drilling on the environment. In particular, the program will be utilized to help replace habitat lost from prolific drilling in the natural-gas-rich Jonah Field in the southwest region of the state.

The program assists in indentifying replacement habitat that is created or improved so it’s in areas that likely won’t be developed for energy use in the future.

“We don’t want to put mitigation dollars in areas that in 10, 15, 20 years may be developed for oil and gas,” said Joe Kiesecker, the conservancy’s Rocky Mountain science director.

When the oil and gas field is eventually tapped and then reclaimed, the conservation effort will result in a net gain in habitat, Kiesecker said.

The efforts of BP and the Nature Conservancy have been chronicled as a case study in this month’s scientific journal BioScience. “BioScience is a pretty tough journal to get papers in,” said Kiesecker, the lead author of the journal article. He added that the effort to offset habitat damage is critical be cause of the increasing demand for domestic energy sources.

“What we see on the ground right now in terms of oil and gas development represents 10 to 15 percent of what we might see over the next 30 years,” Kiesecker said. “And so it makes this sort of planning and thinking about how to minimize and offset impacts from these kinds of developments incredibly important.”

While drilling was already under way at Jonah field when The Nature Conservancy began working with BP, Kiesecker said, the two were working to apply it to another, undeveloped field. BP could then determine what sensitive habitat it might want to avoid before drilling began.

The conservancy believes the new approach can be refined and applied to many other industrial-scale developments, including housing developments. A team of conservancy and Colombian scientists recently began a pilot project involving a coal mine in Colombia that builds off the Jonah project.