Abstract

President Clinton is strongly committed to environmentally sound energy development on the public lands, as demonstrated by his Domestic Natural Gas and Oil Initiative. The President is also committed to “reinventing government” and has called on federal agencies to improve service and cut red tape for their customers, including the oil and gas industry. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which plays a key role in the administration’s implementation of these initiatives, works to ensure that energy resources on public lands are developed in an efficient and environmentally sound manner.

In doing this, the BLM takes a collaborative approach to land management, which gives all affected and interested parties a voice in the BLM’s decision-making process. This approach has been manifested in numerous ways, including the BLM’s development of a reduced royalty rate rule for stripper properties to encourage more oil production on federal lands. Recently, the BLM has collaborated with environmental groups and industry on issues involving the greater Green River basin in southwest Wyoming and northwest Colorado, which contains the most significant onshore natural gas resources on federal land in the continental United States. The BLM has been working with industry representatives, environmentalists, state officials, and others to improve service to the oil and gas industry, as evidenced by the agency’s Onshore Oil and Gas Performance Review that began in 1993.