Recent oil and gas lease sales in western North Dakota were financial record busters, but the Three Affiliated Tribes at New Town wants to prevent oil development from disturbing religious and cultural sites.

The tribes are protesting four oil and gas lease sales on land outside the reservation in McKenzie and Billings counties, claiming aboriginal ties.

The land is owned by the U.S. Forest Service and managed as the Little Missouri National Grasslands. The federal oil and gas acres underneath the surface are owned and managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

This is the first time any Indian tribe has protested a lease sale in this BLM region. The BLM has already dismissed two protests and the tribe is appealing the first dismissal. The appeal clock is ticking on the second dismissal, which was dated Dec. 21.

The tribes protested sales in May, July, September and November, involving 86,000 acres and some of the highest prices ever shelled out for oil and gas leases in North Dakota. Lease prices at each of the sales continued to escalate, finally bringing $11 million for 29,000 acres in November. That compared to $500,000 for half that many acres at the BLM's March sale.

Larry Melvin, who manages the Forest Service's mineral program in North Dakota, said the tribes' protest was announced at the time of the November sale, but the information didn't deter 12 companies from bidding vigorously enough to get the go.

Chun Wong, BLM oil and gas branch chief, said leaseholders can go ahead and explore and drill for oil, even when their lease is under protest.

Only a favorable decision for the tribes would stop activity on the protested acres, he said.

Elliott Milhollin, the tribes' Washington, D.C. attorney, said the BLM has a statutory duty to conduct a National Historic Preservation Act survey prior to a lease sale.

Milhollin said it's not good enough for the BLM to try to comply by acting on specific drilling permits.

"Adverse effects on traditional cultural properties often cannot be mitigated by minor changes in the location of a drilling pad, much less by archaeological data recovery," he said.

In its response, the BLM said it only makes sense to inventory cultural sites when it knows where wells will be drilled on vast leased acreages.

As an example, the BLM cited Blue Buttes near New Town, which are excluded from oil and gas leasing because the tribes identified the buttes as a spiritual site in 1998.

It dismissed the tribes' protest of the November sale, saying the tribes hadn't identified any cultural ties to any of the parcels that were offered.

In the meantime, oil development is on the increase in western North Dakota, centering around three "big play" zones, Melvin said.

Those three big play zones are near Alexander, the second between Sidney, Mont., and Fairfield, and the third north of Medora on the eastern sides of Billings and Golden Valley counties.

The Forest Service is now deciding whether to let Whiting Oil of Denver conduct seismic exploration on 48 sections of the Little Missouri National Grasslands east of Fairfield.

Melvin said companies like Whiting are looking at the potential for secondary and tertiary recovery and reentering old fields with horizontal drills.

Whiting was among successful bidders at the November sale, but Melvin said it's difficult to know if any protested acres are included in its seismic exploration application. Either way, the exploration could go forward under BLM rules, he said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@westriv.com.)