Audit: Unclear if extra funding sped federal drilling permits in Wyoming

A recent federal government audit cannot verify whether additional funds that Congress gave to seven U.S. Bureau of Land Management offices, including Buffalo and Rawlins in Wyoming, helped speed the processing of applications to drill for oil, natural gas or coalbed methane, which is what the money was intended to do. The audit was conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that investigates agencies and public money for Congress. For the BLM audit, Congress asked the GAO to review BLM drilling permits and environmental inspections, said Frank Rusco, who leads the team at the GAO that conducted the audit. The GAO studied the BLM for the fiscal years of 2007 to 2012 — from Oct. 1, 2006, to Sept. 30, 2012. According to the GAO audit, the pilot program was part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The project provided extra funds, and 140 new staff members were sent to the seven offices. There were two reasons why the GAO couldn’t figure out whether the extra money in pilot program was well-spent: an incomplete database and a decrease in natural gas prices, which plunged to a 10-year low in March 2012. That resulted in fewer APDs for natural gas and coalbed methane wells. Although the pilot project money was supposed to speed up APDs, GAO researchers couldn’t figure out the amount of time it took BLM to process APDs from the date they were received to the date they were approved. That’s because the agency’s central oil and gas database was missing certain data necessary to assess whether the deadline was met. The deadline contained other inaccurate permitting processing data, the report said...more