WFAA
Posted on June 15, 2011 at 12:49 AM
MIDLAND ? In West Texas, the roar of drilling rigs is the sound of money.
"This is one of the quieter rigs I've worked on," said Wylie Stokes as he raised his voice on a toasty spring day.
Stokes is in charge of a small team drilling for oil two miles below the Permian Basin.
"Two years ago, it was hard coming across a job," he remembered.
The recession put him out of work for nine months before he found this work.
Now a little lizard, known as the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard, has him worried once more.
"I hadn't seen one until last week when I looked it up on the Internet to see what all the fuss was about," Stokes said.
This species is barely three inches long and the federal government might soon declare it endangered.
"Personally it would ruin a whole lot of us unless we can find another industry where we can do what we know to do," Stokes said.
But Texas oil and gas producers said listing the lizard could decimate their industry, cut production, and cost jobs.
"Those rigs support about 150 jobs each," said Steven Pruett, president of Legacy Reserves. "If you multiply that by the 132 rigs, that's about 20,000 direct jobs that could be impacted by a listing."
At issue is where the lizard lives. It is the Shinnery Oak, a tree that looks like a bush.
But the problem is oil and gas drillers often inadvertently destroy it when they move in equipment and clear space.
Without the Shinnery Oak, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said this lizard cannot survive.
A declaration of endangered species would tighten restrictions on the oil and gas industry.
"You couldn't build roads, you couldn't lay electric lines, you couldn't lay pipelines. You couldn't put in drilling locations, I mean, we're shut down," said Douglass Robison, president of EXL Petroleum. "There's no way to operate without doing those operations. It would be like someone saying you can build a highway, but you can't grade it or pave it."
Specific restrictions have not been formulated by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Lizards have roamed the dusty landscape of West Texas for 15,000 years.
The energy industry says the feds don?t yet know enough about this species to declare it endangered.
How many are still alive? No one knows. It is impossible to conduct a lizard census. But development has destroyed a quarter of the Shinnery Oak habitat and experts figure that might have wiped out a quarter of the little reptiles.
Conservationists are now concerned that without protection, the Dunes Sagebrush lizard could go extinct.
"The lizard is part of the web of life," said John Horning, executive director of? WildEarth Guardians.
Horning's group is trying to protect the lizard.
He said oil and gas producers are overstating the crisis and declaring the lizard endangered would not destroy the industry.
"They're pulling that out of thin air," Horning said. "If you believe that you're just as likely to believe this three-inch lizard is going to be Godzilla the moment the endangered species act protections go into place."
Horning said not every well and drill site in the Permian Basin would be affected, but rather only a sliver of them where Shinnery Oak exists.
"They can extract every last drop," Horning added. "We're saying let's not destroy every last acre of this lizard's habitat."
More crude is pumped out of the Permian Basin than anywhere else in the Continental U.S.
But experts explained the price at the pump is set on the global market and not what happens in West Texas.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said it will have a decision by December on whether to add this lizard to the endangered species list.
Companies and conservationists hope agreements can be reached before then to both protect Shinnery Oak and keep drilling.
Jobs remain the chief concern for Wylie Stokes.
"We might go extinct along with that lizard if we're not careful," Stokes said.
E-mail? jwhitely@wfaa.com
Source: http://www.wfaa.com/news/business/Small-lizard-threatens-oil-production-in-West-Texas-123835059.html
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