Water Quality: Essential to all life

The Green River valley is surrounded by thousands of pristine mountain lakes, flowing from high snow fields and glaciers into our rivers, streams and aquifers.  Our dear friend and geomorphologist Luna Leopold once compared Fremont Lake water to that of distilled. Our vibrant fisheries host five species of trout, including the endangered Colorado River cutthroat.

The UGRA’s goal is to encourage proactive strategies to keep our waters clear, fisheries productive, and communities protected from dangerous chemicals used in the gas fields of Sublette County.

We will continue to work with the Bureau of Land Management, Dept. of Environmental Quality, Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, Sublette County, and natural gas operators to promote more frequent and widespread use of non-hazardous chemicals in all phases of natural gas development.  We strongly encourage agencies to create tools for gas field waste minimization and recycling, and responsible transportation, storage, and especially disposal of hazardous materials currently used in natural gas development.

We also believe that agencies should require the use of Best Management Practices that will protect the State’s ground and surface waters. Agencies should require natural gas project proponents to establish baseline water quality before drilling begins. Companies should understand aquifers; and monitor “produced water” injection sites and facilities, and areas around well pad evaporation pits, with the ultimate goal of utilizing “closed loop” systems.  Use of fresh water for drilling and hydraulic fracturing should be discouraged.

Agencies should also establish geologic standards for “produced water” injection sites, and conduct NEPA analysis prior to new development, to analyze groundwater quantity, quality, expected drawdown, and recharge rates.

Since development began in the Pinedale Anticline and Jonah natural gas fields, industrial, stock, and domestic water wells have become contaminated with hydrocarbons. Some of these have been “voluntarily” remediated; others have been left to “natural attenuation.”  Some have been plugged and abandoned, and others have “Lower Explosive Limits” of methane at the wellhead: flammable water!  Yet the causes of contamination have not been addressed, or definitively explained to a concerned public.

The UGRA has mapped the contaminated water wells under these gas fields, to visually explain the relationships between gas wells, water wells, contamination, and injection sites.  (Map publication pending.)