Reported by Staff

CHEYENNE - The  U.S. Bureau of Land Management  has suspended coal-bed methane drilling in part of the gas-rich Powder River Basin in northeast Wyoming because of concerns for the elk herd that inhabits the area.

Roughly 260 elk are in the Fortification Creek area 25 miles northwest of Gillette. Tulsa, Okla.-based Williams and Lance Oil and Gas, a subsidiary of Houston-based Anadarko Petroleum, have been drilling in the area since last summer, having completed half of the 250 wells planned prior to this week’s stoppage ordered by the BLM.

The agency said it wants to allow time to study how drilling affects elk.

“We’ll be looking at direct and indirect impacts to the elk herd up there, and actually past, present and future development scenarios,”  Michael Madrid, branch chief for fluid mineral operations for the BLM in Wyoming told the AP.

The area environmental assessment by the BLM’s Buffalo Field Office  is expected to take up to three weeks, according to Madrid, and drilling could be allowed to resume, pending the outcome. Environmentalists who opposed the drilling praised the decision.

The decision to suspend drilling won the praises of environmentalists. “They’ve been drilling like absolute crazy in there,” Ashley Roberts, an organizer with the Sheridan-based Powder River Basin Resource Council, one of three groups that contested the drilling. Roberts was quoted in an Associated Press story about the drilling halt. Thousands of coal-bed methane wells have been drilled in the relatively small Fortification Creek area during the last ten years.

Madrid said that both energy companies will be allowed to complete any work  they started prior to the suspension, but will not be able to drill any new wells.