Report criticizes CBM

A recently released report by the national Trout Unlimited organization regarding coal bed methane drilling and exploration is creating quite a stir around the country.

The report doesn't include Alaska, but details the potential destruction of pristine trout streams in the Rocky Mountains, as well as the effect on the hunting and conservation in the western part of the United States. Coal bed methane is a hot topic in Alaska.

"This is a community that is slow to anger, but once they get lit it is a real hot burn," Chris Woods, conservation director for Trout Unlimited, told The Washington Post last month. Trout Unlimited has 130,000 members, 64 percent of whom say they are Republicans. "You are seeing this now on the Rocky Mountain Front. This is one of the Holy Grail places."

In the Rocky Mountains, there are 32 million acres of public land under lease for gas and oil development. According to the Trout Unlimited report, more than 15 percent of all trout habitat in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico falls within areas containing gas and oil reserves where production could occur.

At the heart of the argument is the water being injected into the wells. A recent study on Montana's Tongue River, for example, showed a decline as high as 70 percent in the number of macroinvertebrates, with the suspect being polluted water from nearby coal bed methane wells. With macroinvertebrates such as mayflies and caddisflies being a trout's main source of food there, experts expect to see a decline in the trout stock in the future.

The report also includes detailed information about the negative impact coal bed methane development could potentially have on elk and mule deer stocks in the Rocky Mountain area.

The organization isn't calling for an end to development, just promoting responsible development.

"Certainly our nation needs energy supplies, but at what cost?" the report reads. "Where development does occur, we need to ensure that proper mitigations, stipulations and monitoring plans are in place, and enforced, to protect wildlife. We also need to insist that some places -- such as crucial winter range, migratory corridors and fawning and calving habitat -- remain off limits to development."

The Trout Unlimited report can be viewed at the group's Web site, www.tu.org.