Both sides of the energy divide examined whether cooperation can lead to responsible development of oil and gas on public lands in the West during a meeting of the Rocky Mountain section of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which met Sunday at Snowbird.

Paul Matheny, a vice president of Salt Lake City-based Questar Exploration and Production Co., said his company has spent more than $60 million on a system that moves liquid hydrocarbons and water from gas wells near Pinedale, Wyo., to central processing areas, eliminating the need for over 25,000 tanker truck visits a year that stir up dust and frighten wildlife.

Stephen Bloch, a Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance attorney, said his Salt Lake-based conservation group has contested only about 2 percent of oil and gas lease applications submitted to the Utah office of the Bureau of Land Management in recent years. The group isn't interested in blocking all energy development and has had some success striking deals with energy developers that have allowed their projects to go forward, Bloch said.

For its part, the BLM is tacking new environmental protection requirements onto permits even as it processes a tide of new applications, said Richard Watson, a physical scientist at the federal agency that oversees energy development on 700 million acres of public land.

Rules have been written into permits that force well operators to paint storage tanks in camouflage patterns and colors that blend in with the landscape, build roads that hug the contours of the land instead of straight strips of dirt, and use satellite or radio-based monitoring devices that eliminate the need for numerous trips to well sites.

"They are all based on the idea that the footprint of energy development should be as small and light as possible," Watson said. "We have been successful in reducing the average size of the land area disturbed during operations and returning land towards its natural productive state through interim reclamation of areas no longer needed."

The surge of energy development in the West is closely linked to the rising price of crude oil and natural gas. As prices spike upward, applications for new exploration and drilling permits come pouring through the doors of BLM offices across the West, Watson said.

Bloch said environmental groups like SUWA are wrongly accused of blocking efforts to develop the West's energy resources. In Utah, much of the slowdown is because there aren't enough drilling rigs, he said.

"In Utah, we have 3.5 million acres under lease and only 1 million acres in production," Bloch said. "At the end of the day, you end up with more acres under lease than the industry can reasonably act upon in the foreseeable future."

Matheny scolded environmentalists for ignoring the steps he said Questar is taking to minimize the impact of gas development in places like Pinedale, where the numbers of antelope and other big mammals are rising.

"I think we're really hungry for some intellectual honesty. It really is demoralizing to hear that Pinedale is being destroyed," Matheny said.

SUWA's Bloch said his group often points to Questar as an example of what companies are doing to responsibly develop energy.