Colorado, federal government could be at odds on oil and gas priorities under Trump’s presidency

Donald Trump’s vow to “drill baby, drill” on federal lands won’t initially have much of an impact in Colorado, but may eventually put the state and federal governments at odds on some priorities.

The two areas that could be at risk — places where legal settlements were made between the federal Bureau of Land Management and environmental groups — are the Thompson Divide and a big swath of southwestern Colorado.

There are about 2.1 million acres of issued but unused federal oil and gas leases in the state and the BLM has approved resource management plans, RMPs, for eastern Colorado, the Colorado River and an area around Grand Junction covering more than 1 million acres.

Those plans reflect priorities from the Biden administration and while the Trump administration might want to revise them, it is a long process that would face legal challenges from environmental groups.

“We know what happened under the first administration, we see the blueprint in the Project 2025 so we know how this will play out,” said Natasha Leger, executive director of Paonia-based Citizens for a Health Community. “Nobody is rolling over.”

The one plan still in draft is for the Uncompahgre Field Office, which oversees 1.7 million acres of public lands and federal mineral estate across Montrose, Gunnison, Ouray, Mesa, Delta and San Miguel counties.

The original plan, proposed in 2020 by the Trump administration, sought to expand oil and gas drilling.

It was the target of a lawsuit by Citizens for a Healthy Community and other environmental groups, arguing the plan had not analyzed how more oil, gas and coal development could harm organic agriculture, the climate and endangered species like the Gunnison sage grouse.

In a settlement agreement, the BLM said it would reassess oil and gas leasing in the plan. “Now they don’t have to change anything,” Leger said. “The new plan will probably look like the 2020 RMP.”

After a decades-long battle by environmentalists and landowners to block oil and gas operators from the Thompson Divide, which stretches from south from Glenwood Springs to Crested Butte, the Biden administration in April removed about 221,000 acres from drilling and mining for 20 years.

But Project 2025, the policy checklist put together by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, includes: “Abandon withdrawals of lands from leasing in the Thompson Divide of the White River National Forest, Colorado.”

A more subtle, but pervasive impact will be in rewriting policy guidance and manuals used by BLM staff. “A lot of stuff can be undone with memos to reverse some of the policies,” said Jon Holst, a senior policy advisor for the environmental group Western Resource Advocates.

Two examples of how that could change and in doing so come in conflict with Colorado priorities are wildlife corridors and mitigating impacts of oil and gas drilling, Holst said.

BLM had proposed a number of “areas of critical environmental concern” to protect big game corridors in concert with state goals, but the new administration could roll those back.

“In Colorado state (oil and gas) rules rely heavily on mitigation,” Holst said “Last year BLM made an amendment to be in compliance with state rules. Once that gets revoked, we are going to have a disconnect between how the state manages oil and gas and how the feds do.”

For industry, however, the hope is that the new administration will provide an opportunity to get back to “a regular order on leasing,” Kathleen Sgamma,  president of the Western Energy Alliance, a trade group.

Oil and gas production on federal lands has been up, but it has depended on leases issued during the Obama and first Trump administrations, said Sgamma, who was one of three authors of public lands energy policy recommendations in the 2025 Project document. “Lease sales in Colorado have been particularly anemic, so I would anticipate moving forward on lease sales.”

The Western Slope is a natural gas play which is less lucrative than oil, so Sgamma said “you aren’t going to see it go gangbusters like the Permian” in Texas. “We still have operators who are committed to the Western Slope and they need leases.”