The Bureau of Land Management (Bureau) manages public lands in the Pinedale Field Office (Field Office) planning area, which lies within west-central Wyoming (Figure 1). Lands in Teton County are not included in these reasonable foreseeable development scenarios. The main goal of our evaluation is to technically analyze the oil and gas resource occurring within the Field Office area and to project future development potential and activity levels for the period 2001 through 2020. This analysis makes a base line projection that assumes future activity levels will not be constrained by management-imposed conditions (Rocky Mountain Federal Leadership Forum, 2002). Where legislatively imposed restrictions are applied to lands within the Field Office area, we have considered those restrictions when determining future activity levels and have constrained our base line projection to reflect those restrictions. Finally, projections of future activity levels for each resource management plan alternative are presented.
The reasonable foreseeable development evaluation and projections presented below review and analyze past, present, and potential future exploratory, development, and production operations and activities. It also presents occurrence potential for oil and gas, coalbed gas, and deep hydrocarbons (at depths greater than 15,000 feet) as well as available estimates of the hydrocarbon resources that may be present within the Field Office area. Additional factors used to project future activities include, but are not limited to review and analysis of:
• published oil and gas resource information (including a number of on-line databases) for the area
• a call for data from oil and gas operators
• future oil and gas price estimates
• petroleum (see Glossary definition for petroleum) technology research and development
• geophysical activity
• bid performance at lease sales
• limitations on access and infrastructure.
It must be emphasized that the reasonable foreseeable development projections presented are not worst-case projections, but reasonable and science-based projections of the anticipated oil and gas activity and uses logical and technically based assumptions to make those projections.
Total federal gas resource ownership in the Field Office planning area is about 2,526,640 acres (85 percent) of 2,965,201 total acres. The Forest Service (53 percent) and the Bureau (46 percent) manage most of the federal mineral lands in the Field Office area. Smaller amounts of federal mineral lands are managed by the Bureau of Reclamation. State and private minerals lands amount to about 438,561acres, or about 15 percent of total acres within Field Office boundaries. Again, Teton County lands are not included as part of this analysis.
