Wildcat Creek is a tiny ribbon of water that meanders through 10 miles of Ed Swartz's sprawling cattle ranch. Flowing just a month or so out of the year, it seems an unlikely lifeline for 15,000 acres of dry high-plains prairie. But four generations of Swartzes have adapted to the creek's ephemeral flow. When runoff fills the creek in the spring, Swartz floods patches of sepia valley bottom and turns them into emerald green hayfields that get his "girls"--a herd of charcoal-black cows--through the long Wyoming winters. But the fields that make his operation viable are in trouble now. He has been unable to irrigate for four years because high salt levels in the creek water will kill his hay.
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Prosperity's Brutal Price
Wyoming's New Energy Boom Is Creating Jobs, Generating Wealth and Making the U.S. Less Dependent on Foreign Oil. But You Wouldn't Want to Live There.
"Whiskey's for drinking and water's for fighting," they say out here. But Swartz and many other ranchers around Wyoming and throughout the West are now engaged in a fight that has turned that adage on its head. It's not about too little water but too much--too much of the wrong kind. Water is being pumped out of the ground at a neighbor's ranch upstream because the water contains methane gas. After the gas is stripped out, the water, with high levels of sodium, is considered waste and is dumped into the creek that runs through Swartz's property. "I want things back like they were," says Swartz. "The state is so greedy for money they will let anything happen. They will ignore their own rules, laws and regulations to kiss [up to] the methane industry. And it really, really bothers me."
The American cowboy is, by reputation, a man of few words. But this rancher is talking rapid fire, spitting out words like bitter coffee grounds. His fields are fallow, his legal bills are mounting and his way of life is under siege--all because, he says, common sense has been suspended in a mad dash for coal-bed methane, a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that, among other things, is used to heat millions of American homes. Many ranchers and environmentalists in Wyoming, a very conservative, pro-industry state, say they feel like ghosts. They have trouble getting their story told in Wyoming's pro-business daily newspapers, and their political leaders don't seem to be listening, though a new governor has promised to change that. Swartz has been a Republican precinct committee member for 35 years, but he says his party compatriots ignore him when he takes photographs and stories of tainted water to Republican meetings around the state. And that burns him up. Things have gotten so bad, he says, "I am ashamed to say that I am a lifelong working Republican."
It's boom time again in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, 20,000 square miles of north-central Wyoming and parts of Montana--what most Americans would think of as the middle of nowhere. It was part of a great swampy area where, over the course of millions of years, plants were transformed into coal. It is home to one of the world's largest coal deposits, with beds on top of beds up to 300 feet thick. The methane is trapped in the crevices of the coal, which is held in place by the ground water.
Today the Powder River Basin is a sparsely settled blanket of grass over rolling, seemingly endless, nearly treeless hills. Creeks named Crazy Woman, Spotted Horse and Bitter drain the hills and the indigo saw-toothed Bighorn Mountains, and flow through valley bottoms lined with towering, centuries-old cottonwoods before they empty into the Powder River, named after the abundant silt that renders it the color of chocolate milk. The emptiness of the basin is broken by the high plains towns of Gillette, Sheridan, Buffalo and a few others with just a handful of trailers and a bar.
Though the new-energy rush already is controversial, especially the effects on the arid region's water, it appears to be just ramping up. The Bush administration, led by Wyoming's own son, Vice President Dick Cheney, has underscored the importance of coal-bed methane to the nation's energy strategy. Estimates vary, but as it turns out, the Powder River Basin may have between 15 and 40 trillion cubic feet of potentially recoverable coal-bed methane (the country uses 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in a year), and the Green River Basin, near Rock Springs, has significantly more than that. Together with the rest of the West, including Montana, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, those fields could contain the largest gas deposits in history. When the U.S. government releases 8 million acres for coal gas development this year, it will be the largest drilling project ever on federal lands.
In the mid-1990s, two unemployed oilfield workers came up with a fast and cheap way to siphon this trapped gas out of the unfathomably vast underground coal deposits. Since then, more than 80 national and local companies have scoured county land records and scrambled over the hills, drilling hasty holes to capture the valuable methane that lies beneath private ranches and government-owned land, both state and federal.
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