In Montana, Gas Drilling Hits a Rare Roadblock

BOZEMAN, Mont. -- Driven by soaring prices, empowered by federal mining law and cheered on by the Bush administration, energy companies have been unstoppable in recent years as they march through the Rocky Mountain West searching for natural gas.

This search, which affects about 60 million American homes that heat with gas, has a guiding rule: If companies can lease land, they can drill it. The rule has proved inviolable, even though the companies' newest drilling technique -- called coal-bed methane extraction -- has often enraged environmentalists and local ranchers by lowering water tables, souring streams with salt and scarring wild lands with wastewater pits and screaming gas compressors.

One county in the West has had the temerity and the wherewithal to break the rule of lease it and drill. Not one gas well has been drilled here in Gallatin County, where the Old West ranch culture has been replaced by the recreating ways of the New West bourgeoisie.

Affluent, well-educated newcomers from the East and West coasts have bought up and taken over this western Montana county in the past 15 years, turning it into a place where people go outside not to work the land, but to play on it. Laced with blue-ribbon trout streams and surrounded by four splendid ranges of the Rockies, Gallatin is where you can buy Victoria's Secret underwear in the morning and see grizzly bears in the afternoon. A pricey kitchen store on Main Street last month offered an evening lecture titled "Beyond Sushi."

When outsiders threaten the lifestyles and ranchettes of these latter-day settlers, they are quick to raise money, hire lawyers, seduce the media and round up local politicians.

That is precisely what they did when they heard that the energy division of the privately held J.M. Huber Corp., based in Edison, N.J., had leased mineral rights to about 16,000 acres in a part of the county sprinkled with high-end houses. And it has stopped Huber cold, at least so far.

The company has been stymied in the county for five years, even though Huber's geologists have said there could be half a trillion cubic feet of natural gas here, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Americans consume about 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year. The federal Energy Information Administration has described the Rockies as potentially "a Persian Gulf of natural gas." About 9 percent of the national supply now comes from coal-bed methane drilling, but that is predicted to increase sharply in the next decade.

The prolonged stalemate on drilling here is remarkable, considering that a similar attempt to hold back coal-bed methane drilling in Delta County, Colo., has been slapped down in state court, and also considering that the federal government has cleared the way in the past year for 39,000 coal-bed methane wells to be drilled in the Powder River Basin in neighboring Wyoming.

"We hope we have created enough of a hissy fit that the company is reluctant to come here," said Melissa Frost, conservation representative for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an environmental group based in Bozeman, the major city in Gallatin County.

That hissy fit, together with the lawyers and the political maneuvering that give it teeth, may yet fail to hold back the tide of coal-bed methane extraction, a shallow drilling technique that goes after gas lying in seams of coal. To get at it, drillers must first pump out huge quantities of water, which is often tainted with salt and other minerals. The process -- especially the disposal of huge quantities of foul water -- tends to be far messier and, environmentalists say, more destructive than conventional deep-well gas drilling.

Huber has not given up in Gallatin County. It is suing in state and federal court, and experts say the history of western mining law supports its claims. That law allows split ownership of the land, which creates a fundamental conflict.

Mineral rights on most of the disputed land in Gallatin are owned separately from surface rights and have been leased to Huber by absentee landlords. State and federal courts have generally ruled that energy companies, if they have valid leases to gas and oil beneath the ground, can operate on that land, even without the consent of owners who have surface rights. Most of the county's new landowners do not own mineral rights.

Huber representatives declined to be interviewed for this story. In an e-mailed statement, the company said it has followed the law, "but Gallatin County effectively blocked the right to drill through a series of zoning changes and the imposition of onerous conditions."