South of Glacier Park, Badger-Two Med dispute will continue

The battle over oil and gas leases in the Badger-Two Medicine will continue. The Department of Interior and Solonex, the company that owns the leases had asked U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon to suspend the case so the two parties could negotiate a settlement in the 30-plus year battle.

But those talks have fallen apart.

Now Solonex, in a brief to the court on Jan. 19, claims that any attempt to cancel the leases by the DOI would be arbitrary and contrary to federal law. Solonex is represented by the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that often takes up private business and citizens issues in land use disputes in federal court.

The DOI in December said it tentatively planned on canceling the leases altogether, claiming the U.S. Forest Service never did a proper examination of the impacts on Blackfeet Tribe cultural resources when it sold the leases in 1981.

The leases have been held in a bureaucratic limbo since they were granted. Solonex got fed up with the delay and finally sued in 2013. The Solonex lease is a 3,000-plus acre area near Hall Creek.

But the Blackfeet claim the 160,000 acres of just south of Glacier National Park along the Continental Divide is sacred to them and shouldn’t be drilled.

Solonex sees it differently and they claim the Department can’t cancel the leases after 30 years. It runs contrary to federal mining laws.

“Indeed, if the Secretary (of Interior) could wait more than three decades before attempting to cancel oil and gas lease, it would completely frustrate the national policy to develop the oil and gas resources on federal lands,” they argue.

Solonex also claims that the Forest Service did, in fact, do an environmental review of the leases at the time and found no issues with them.

The company is asking the court to stop the DOI from canceling the leases and to lift the suspension of the lease.

If the court will not do that, it’s asking Leon to at least require the lease cancellation to go through a NEPA process, where Solonex would, presumably, further argue its case.

A DOI spokesperson said the agency does not comment on pending cases, but in previous court filings, The DOI has hinged its case on the impacts the lease would bring to Blackfeet cultural resources. The lease would require new roads and a well pad in what is now a wild, unroaded landscape, home to grizzly bears, wolves and an elk herd of more than 800.