• Legal questions loom over 20,000 acres of prime habitat for mule deer, pronghorn and sage grouse successfully nominated for drilling leases by Casper-based Kirkwood Oil and Gas.

By Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile.com

In December, after an extraordinarily controversial planning process, the Biden administration’s Bureau of Land Management signed off on a final resource management plan that’s now governing 3.6 million acres of southwestern Wyoming.

The Rock Springs-area plan sought to balance the needs of development and wildlife, though unhappy Wyoming leaders maintained it tilted too far toward conservation at the expense of industrial activities.

Over 280,000 acres of the so-called Golden Triangle, for example — home to the densest population of sage grouse left on Earth — was designated as an “area of critical environmental concern,” excluded from surface-disturbing activities and expressly closed to mineral leasing.

Ten months later, the BLM is proposing to put 14 parcels encompassing 19,839 acres of the closed area up for auction at a June 2026 oil and gas lease sale, according to a Rocky Mountain Wild analysis.

Although it’s in the process of being revised by the Trump administration’s BLM, the Rock Springs Resource Management Plan that was approved in December 2024 remains “active” and in effect, employees with the agency told WyoFile in the spring. The agency’s proposal to offer oil and gas leases in violation of the current land-use plan has Bureau of Land Management watchdogs scratching their heads.

“If you’re [offering] parcels that have been closed under a valid and existing RMP, that would seem to be illegal,” said Matt Gaffney, an attorney who directs legal and government affairs for the Wyoming Outdoor Council.

The illegality is spelled out in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the law governing the administration of BLM lands, Gaffney said. Every BLM field office — in this case, Rock Springs — has a resource management plan that guides decision-making. If a lessee or permittee is found to be in violation of that plan, they’re issued an order of noncompliance and can be subject to civil penalties.

If the BLM violates its own land-use plan, he said, the remedy would be suing to stop the action in federal district court or filing an appeal with the Interior Board of Land Appeals.

The nearly 20,000 Golden Triangle acres proposed for inclusion in BLM’s June 2026 oil and gas lease sale were nominated in 2021 by Kirkwood Oil and Gas, according to Steve Degenfelder, a landman for the Casper-based outfit.

In 2019, under the previous resource management plan, BLM leased 23,626 acres of the Golden Triangle, some of which went to Kirkwood. An “emergency letter” from Wyoming Outdoor Council and Audubon Rockies asking Gov. Mark Gordon to intervene failed to halt the sale at the time.

Six years later, Degenfelder says Kirkwood needs the additional acres to make a Golden Triangle drilling operation viable. Pulling back the leases from the auction could jeopardize “many billions of dollars” in drilling revenue, he said.

“This is the conundrum the federal government and environmental groups need to realize,” Degenfelder told WyoFile. “The resource, if it’s there as we envision, it’s a great deal of tax revenue and revenue to the state of Wyoming and to the federal government. It’s not going to be developed if there’s big holes in the play.”

If the leases do go to auction, wildlife stipulations will likely be affixed, though it remains unclear what exactly.

“I don’t know what the stipulations are going to be with respect to those lands within the no-leasing area,” Degenfelder said.

A stipulation instructing drillers to coordinate with Wyoming wildlife managers would likely be attached to parcels that intersect with a migration path used by mule deer traveling from the Red Desert to Hoback — the state’s first designated migration corridor.

There’d also likely be sage grouse stipulations in the area, which is designated a “priority habitat management area with limited exceptions.” Sprawling between Farson and the Wind River Range’s remote western slope, the 367,000-acre Golden Triangle region is considered the best of the best sagebrush-steppe habitat remaining and home to “the highest [sage] grouse density areas on Earth,” according to biologists.

Meanwhile, migrating pronghorn that use a corridor that’s been “identified” but not yet “designated” would go without the same protective stipulation unless Wyoming completes its process in advance of the lease sale.

Degenfelder is optimistic that horizontal drilling and other techniques can spare the Golden Triangle’s world-class wildlife resources from population declines and abandonment documented in other Green River Basin gas fields, like the Pinedale Anticline.

“I really do feel like avoidance of surface disturbance and disturbance to wildlife can be achieved with new technology,” he said.
But some Wyoming conservation groups are maintaining that stipulations and technology aren’t enough and that the leases should never have been offered in the first place.

“It’s deeply troubling that BLM is trying to lease parcels that are closed to protect intact wildlife habitat in the Golden Triangle,” said Julia Stuble, Wyoming state director for The Wilderness Society. “The agency has to quickly remove these leases from offer and clean up whatever internal review is not working in allowing these parcels to even get through to this stage. We don’t want to see this happen again.”

It’s unclear why the parcels were offered. BLM officials with the state headquarters office in Cheyenne were unreachable for an interview. With the federal government shut down, the agency is only responding to “urgent” media inquiries related to visitor access, safety and essential operations, according to a U.S. Department of Interior spokeswoman.

The BLM is taking feedback on its June 2026 oil and gas lease sale until Nov. 17. Public comments can be submitted online.
Mary Jo Rugwell, a retired BLM-Wyoming state director, said that she understands frustrations with the current Rock Springs Resource Management Plan. Calling it “problematic” would be “understating it,” she said, but that doesn’t excuse ignoring the governing document for the area.

“There’s the process that you have to follow,” Rugwell said. “The problem is that now processes are not being followed in a lot of instances. It’s a very different time right now.”

Other former federal employees are urging swift action to eliminate the Golden Triangle oil and gas leases from the agency’s June 2026 auction.

“You cannot include any lease sale lands that are not available for leasing, that is not open to interpretation under any law,” said Nada Culver, the former BLM deputy director who signed the Rock Springs plan in December.

Whatever the BLM’s rationale is for proposing the leases, there’s “no excuse,” Culver said.

“The important thing is they need to fix it immediately,” she said.

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.