This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2005, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
VERNAL - Red Wash is unusually green this year, so it's not easy to spot the dozen or so drilling rigs spiking the ground amid high desert red cliffs, dusty gray hills and expanses of sage and cheatgrass spread across thousands of acres below the deep blue July sky.
At night, though, lights attached to the rigs sparkle in the darkness, a source of comfort to Vernal resident John Busch. If you were lost on the hundreds of miles of dirt and gravel roads threading the vast patch of natural gas southeast of town, the little beacons "would give you hope, just like a lighthouse," he said.
If so, they illuminate not crashing waves but the stampede of energy explorers outfitted with new technology that will allow them to extract the vast reservoirs of natural gas in Uintah, Duchesne and Daggett counties.
The eastern Utah high-desert city of Vernal is smack in the middle of the resurgent Rocky Mountain natural gas rush spurred by the price of energy and the Bush administration's directive to encourage exploration and development.
"Anytime you have an energy boom, you're reaping the glory of good, high-paying jobs," said Bill Johnson, director of economic development for Uintah County. "Everybody is running to the bank with smiles on their faces."
The rural region bereft of an airport, railroad or interstate highway has been through this before with the energy exploration boom and bust of the early 1980s. Now, amid hope and dread, the city is struggling with problems as dense as the rock the drills must penetrate to get at the buried riches.
Bouncing across deeply rutted dirt roads south of Red Wash, Busch, a former Chevron exploration manager who teaches petroleum science at the Uintah Basin Applied Technology College, pointed out rigs under construction, rigs being dismantled and well heads producing gas.
The area is where most of the Uinta Basin's energy exploration and development is expected during the next 15 years. Unlike better-developed fields in Wyoming and Colorado, it's still unknown just how much gas eventually will flow into the pipeline, Busch said.
But it's certain to be more than what drillers found during the last boom, which extracted only about 3 percent of the known reserves, said Duane Zavadil, a spokesman for Denver-based gas exploration company Bill Barrett Corp. Armed with high-tech exploration techniques including seismic surveys, gamma-ray measurement and high-pressure hydraulics to fracture deep rock, energy exploration companies are fanning out across the basin, drilling 4,000 to 15,000 feet to get at so-called unconventional gas trapped in the wrinkles of the Earth.
WE'RE IN THE MONEY
A study completed last year by the Utah Energy Office estimated that a single gas well in Uintah or Duchesne County would create 13 new jobs and $309,300 in additional personal income. The state would net $55,300 in tax revenues, the counties $29,200.
But with the money comes headaches. The rigs sticking out of the oil and gas patches surrounding Vernal are attracting thousands of itinerant workers from all over the country who have little reason to love a town that can't even house them.
Terry Glass, a clerk at the Weston Plaza Hotel at the western edge of town, rolled her eyes when asked if business was up.
"You can't believe it," she said. "We were all amazed at how busy we were this winter."
Energy companies now buy blocks of hotel and motel rooms year-round for their workers, she said. Tourists wanting to explore nearby Dinosaur National Monument who arrive without reservations often are out of luck.
DINOS AND DIESELS
Take a drive on Main Street, a section of U.S. Highway 40 that cuts through the city. Big dinosaur statues at either end of town delight visitors to the region known for its fossil history and because of the dinos' seasonal outfits: rodeo togs, fishing gear, a protruding arrow when hunters come to town.
On the quaint blocks of old Main Street, life-size metal cutout cowpokes appear to snooze in front of an espresso bar and the Chamber of Commerce. A giant trout fly sits atop one outdoors-equipment shop. Outsized oars beckon Green River boaters into another.
It's tourist heaven, yet now traffic always looks like rush hour complicated by semitrailer trucks bearing the names Halliburton, Chevron, Bill Barrett or any of the hundreds of other companies cashing in.
And Vernal's population of 8,000 is expected to double within 10 years.
"Part of what we're dealing with is, the influx of people is not at a gradual pace, it's overnight," said Vernal Police Chief Gary Jensen. "People are just showing up."
Jensen, police chief since March, is having his own trouble getting settled. A former Davis County sheriff's deputy, Jensen is living in a recreational trailer during the week, then driving back to Syracuse where his wife and five children are waiting until their Vernal home finally gets built - that is, if the contractor can overcome the shortage of carpenters, drywallers and every other type of worker necessary to build up the city.
The drilling companies are telling their workers to live in Vernal because it's the center of the action, said Sonja Norton, head of the Uintah Basin Board of Realtors. That may sound like great news to a real estate agent, but Norton's not so sure.
"I'm kind of sad," she said. "I was happy with the market before. I don't know about all this growth."
ON THE BUBBLE
Norton predicts housing will be overbuilt and prices eventually will stabilize or decline. That's what happened in the bust of the 1980s, when plummeting oil prices left hundreds of foreclosed homes that could be had for as little as $9,000.
Sondra Waller remembers that time, too. She and her husband arrived in the early 1980s. They couldn't find an apartment, and ended up buying the only available home sight-unseen. Soon after, the boom fizzled.
"The oil people left all these beautiful homes that had just been built," said Waller, a receptionist at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Vernal field office. "A lot of people lost jobs."
Houses now sell within hours at prices higher than on the Wasatch Front. Rentals are passed around by word of mouth.
Brian Tucker, Uintah County director of building and zoning and the county planner, said building permit revenues already are 180 percent of what they were in 2004. From 2003 to 2004, the county recorded one major subdivision. This year it recorded three already and has another five or six in the works.
The pace is killing them.
"I'm not planning anymore, I'm pretty much just reacting," Tucker said. "We require the developer to create all the necessary infrastructure. That's working OK now because we have a lot of county roads not at capacity. But five years from now, our major roads will be at capacity."
IDENTITY CRISIS
Vernal is a family-oriented community that doesn't have much to offer its young adults, who leave in droves.
"We're in transition," Norton said. "We're not a small town, and we're not a big city."
When he took the Vernal police job, Jensen hoped for a small-town experience. But city-style problems loom. Domestic violence is increasing enough that the city may seek funds to build a shelter for victims of abuse.
"Certainly our drug issues are up. We [can] buy dope just like the big town. It's very available here," he said.
"The thing that frightens me, this was a 25-person police department in the 1980s. Currently, it's 16," Jensen said. "We lost a third of our department because all of a sudden the boom dried up and the world left Vernal. We're having a difficult time getting quality applicants because we don't have a competitive wage compared to the oil fields."
Even with their high-paying jobs, the oil and gas companies are in the same situation, looking for all kinds of workers, from roughnecks to engineers, said Paul Hacking, president of the Uintah Basin Applied Technology Center.
On any given day, Vernal's Workforce Services office has hundreds of jobs listed. But that's deceiving, Hacking said, because every listing for a truck driver, welder, rig hand, wireline operator, roustabout, rigger foreman, drywall hanger or engineer represents multiple openings.
The worker shortage is in part due to competition from drilling operations elsewhere. Companies poach each other for workers. In a bit of Western history repeating itself, a Colorado company recently announced it was bringing in workers from China.
But there's another problem: Too many prospective employees can't pass mandatory drug tests. As with just about everywhere else in the nation, methamphetamine use is on the rise in the Uinta Basin.
Some believe the drilling companies share the blame because they demand their employees work 18-hour shifts during their one-week-on, one-week-off schedules. But the itinerant lifestyle also can feed a kind of social carelessness. And for some, part of the appeal of oil and gas fieldwork, where "roughneck" is an official job title, is its tough, outlaw image.
TAXES AND SPENDING
The Uintah Basin Applied Technology College, as well as universities offering petroleum engineering degrees, are trying to make up for a generation of workers lost after the last bust. As fieldwork has become more technical, training has become necessarily more sophisticated.
The college holds classes in temporary trailers because the Legislature hasn't been able to come up with the $9.7 million needed for a permanent building. That irks community leaders, considering the amount of money the state is raking in from the region.
Last year, 150 Uintah High students dropped out early, many of them destined for the oil and gas patch, Hacking said.
Or they will move away, leaving the best jobs to out-of-state workers like Kyle Lightsey, an engineer from Mississippi who commutes by plane to the Bill Barrett patch, where he will work for four months.
"Halliburton pays me by the day," Lightsey said. "So I take it while I can get it."
That take-the-money-and-run attitude frustrates Johnson, the county economic development director.
"We're going to Mississippi, to Houston, to Wyoming [for workers] just so we can keep rolling out here," he said. "Where are their paychecks going? Back to Mississippi, Houston, Wyoming. We're exporting our kids and we're exporting our paychecks."
The Uinta Basin's flush times accelerated in 2001, when the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Vernal field office approved 491 applications for permits to drill, or APDs. In 2000, it had approved just 237. Last year it approved 638; by June 16 of this year, it approved 506 and is well on the way to more than 1,000, a record year for one of the busiest BLM offices in the nation.
Source: BLM
How much is there?
Estimates for technically recoverable natural gas in the Rocky Mountains range from 226 to 383 trillion cubic feet. A single gas well will produce about 2 billion cubic feet of gas. An average household uses 125,000 cubic feet of natural gas per year, which means one well will supply 800 homes during its 20-year life span.
In 2003, proven natural gas reserves in the Rocky Mountain states represented 27 percent of U.S. reserves, or 18 percent of the nation's supply. The Rockies' share of lower-48 production will near 40 percent by 2025.
Currently, natural gas supplies about 20 percent of the nation's energy needs, but is the fastest-growing energy source. Demand is forecast to increase nearly 40 percent during the next 20 years, including a 50 percent uptick in demand for gas-fired electric power. Gas heats 61 percent of U.S. households, cools homes and provides fuel for cooking.
Source: Department of Energy; Bill Barrett Corp.; the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States.
More acres to drill
The Vernal office of the Bureau of Land Management has completed a draft management plan and an environmental impact statement for the region. Under its preferred alternative, 983,000 acres of land would be open to oil, gas and coal-bed methane leasing, 65,000 more acres than now leasable.
Source: BLM-Vernal