Proposed Energy Corridors Will Impact Thousands of Acres of Utah's Public Lands

Help protect Utah’s special places by attending the public meetings in Grand Junction and Salt Lake City on January 15th and 17th!

Pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Departments of Energy, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Defense have issued a draft plan proposing over 6,000 miles of energy corridors through public land in eleven western states with a width of 3,500 feet (2/3 of a mile) unless otherwise specified.  Thousands of acres of Utah’s scenic public lands are in the draft plan’s cross-hairs, including Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Arches National Park and remote and scenic proposed wilderness areas including Goldbar Canyon, Duma Point, and Hatch Canyon.

The November 2007 “West-wide Energy Corridor Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement” (DPEIS) -- http://corridoreis.anl.gov/ -- proposes huge swaths of habitat-fragmenting corridors through hundreds of thousands of acres of public land (including national recreation areas, monuments, wildlife refuges, and more) to “accommodate multiple pipelines (such as for oil, gas, or hydrogen), electricity transmission lines, and related infrastructure, such as access and maintenance roads, compressors, pumping stations, and other structures.” Once these corridors are designated, energy companies will then push to “connect the dots” between far-flung segments of public land over thousands of miles of private and state lands, such as state parks and wildlife areas. 

Help protect Utah’s priceless public lands -- attend the meeting in Grand Junction on 1/15/08 and/or the meeting in Salt Lake City on 1/17/08 and tell the Department of Energy that energy corridors don’t belong in special places!  When the Department of Energy took on the challenge of creating these corridors, they also took on the responsibility of doing it right.  Doing it right would involve making sure that:

• existing corridors are used the the maximum extent possible, and new pipelines or powerlines are actually needed;
• the federal lands chosen are necessary locations and special or sensitive public lands are avoided altogether;
• risks to federal and other affected lands are realistically and thoroughly assessed, so that those risks can then be avoided or minimized;
• once appropriate locations are identified, projects on federal lands are presumptively limited to those corridors;
• projects are subjected to best management practices to limit damage to other resources, recreation and views; and
• consideration is given to improving access for renewable energy, such as wind and solar.

A wealth of information, including talking points for the meetings, maps of special places impacted by corridors in each Western state, and fact sheets detailing the entire process, are available at www.suwa.org/energycorridors and The Wilderness Society's online action center.

Don’t miss your chance to help make sure this important process is done right -- attend the public meeting in Grand Junction on January 15th and/or the meeting in Salt Lake City on January 17th   and make your voice heard!