Process begins for mapping energy corridors
BOISE – Federal land managers take their first public step next week in plotting routes across the West for billions of dollars worth of future powerlines and oil and natural gas pipelines to connect the region’s vast energy reserves with consumers in the nation’s fastest-growing cities.
The Bureau of Land Management holds a public meeting Tuesday in Denver, followed by 10 additional sessions culminating in Phoenix and Seattle on Nov. 3, to help it draw up energy transmission and distribution corridors, a requirement of the 2005 energy bill signed Aug. 8 by President Bush.
Total U.S. energy demand is expected to grow by about 1.9 percent a year until 2025, and the West has seen unprecedented growth in oil and natural gas production, wind prospecting and plans for new coal-fired power plants in states including Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and North Dakota. As a result, Congress has ordered maps of where upgraded and new electricity transmission facilities are to be built, to expedite the construction of links to energy-hungry cities such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Seattle.
Environmentalists, ranchers and farmers, as well as fossil fuel companies, will monitor the BLM meetings to make sure issues such as wilderness protection, eminent domain, and access to markets are taken into account as federal officials lay out how America’s Western energy grid will take shape over the next two decades.
“The theory behind the meetings is a good one, but the problem is going to be avoiding sensitive areas,” said David Alberswerth, a senior policy adviser with The Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C. “It’s so important for the public to get involved in this, including wildlife managers, ranchers and farmers. The trick is to locate these facilities with the minimal amount of environmental damage and disruption to people’s lives.”
The meetings will help BLM managers complete a preliminary environmental impact statement by Jan. 30, 2006. The final environmental impact statement, due next October, will assess the impacts of expanding existing energy corridors – and identify new ones.
The corridors must be included in new BLM land-use plans by August 2007.
At each meeting, a map will show existing transmission corridors and possible areas where new corridors could be designated, said BLM spokeswoman Heather Feeney.
“We are working on increasing supply,” Feeney said of projects across the West including more than 1,500 megawatts of planned power generation from proposed coal-fired power plants in Idaho and Nevada slated to be built by Sempra Energy, a California utility owner, “But it doesn’t do anybody any good unless you can get the energy there (to cities).”
Environmentalists, including Alberswerth, say they want to make sure energy corridors don’t traverse proposed wilderness areas such as 9.5 million acres in Utah’s backcountry that would be set aside if the Red Rock Wilderness Act were to pass Congress.
Ranchers have raised concerns that ambitious aims of the 2005 energy bill could result in the federal government seizing private land.
Earlier this year, Wyoming rancher Nancy Sorenson, a member of the Western Organization of Resource Councils in Billings, raised the specter of eminent domain, saying the designation of transmission corridors “could force landowners to make even more economic sacrifices for energy development.”
Utilities, oil and gas companies will follow the meetings.
“This could be important for the industry, if there are good corridors laid out, and it gives us an opportunity to get our product to consumers in a more timely fashion,” said Ericka Cook, a spokeswoman for the Petroleum Association of Wyoming.