Badlands News: Roadless Rule and RMPs

View from the Maah Daah Hey Trail near Bear Creek. Photo by Nora Swenson, June 18th, 2025.

Roadless Rule Comment Period

The comment period for the rescission of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule opened on August 29 and will last only 21 days, ending on September 19.

Let's stop this while we still can.

Submit your comments to the Federal Register.

“Revoking the popular conservation Roadless Rule would be a destructive policy shift that sides with corporations and industry over citizens’ desire for safe water and clean air, wildlife and wildlife management, and outdoor recreation, all of which are important pieces to the North Dakota economy,” said Shannon Straight, Executive Director of BCA. “Endless roads will be at the expense of ND grasslands, wilderness and wildlife that are part of our ND identity and what makes ND unique and attractive to both residents and tourists.”

Enacted in 2001, the incredibly popular Roadless Rule protects 58.5 million acres of Forest Service land, including national forests and grasslands like Little Missouri National Grassland.

North Dakota has over 250,000 acres of Inventoried Roadless Areas, which you can see on this map from the U.S. Forest Service.

According to an analysis from National Parks Conservation Association, “17.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas are within 30 miles of national park lands and support the greater national park ecosystems.” Rescinding the Roadless Rule could have significant impacts on national parks and their gateway economies.

Sarah McMillan, Lands and Wildlife Program director at the Western Environmental Law Center: “This move by the Trump administration is just as bad as selling public lands to the highest bidder.”

Research shows that fires are significantly more likely in areas with roads. As George Wuerthner explains for National Parks Traveler, “nearly 85% of all wildfires are human-caused [...] Of these human-caused wildfires, 95% occurred within ½ mile of a road.”

Tracy Stone-Manning, President of The Wilderness Society: “Gutting the Roadless Rule—which has protected our forests for 25 years—would be the single largest rollback of conservation protections in our nation’s history.”

Not only does the Roadless Rule help keep USFS land ecologically intact — providing habitat for fish, wildlife, and over 1,600 endangered or threatened species — it also helps protect clean drinking water for more than 60 million Americans.

Sierra Club created this helpful factsheet that provides a quick overview of the Roadless Rule.

Spill Reported in Mountrail County

Hunt Oil estimated that 370 barrels (15,540 gallons) of oil were spilled on August 29, 13 miles southeast of Stanley: “about 50 barrels escaped the well pad and impacted nearby farmland.”

Energy and Data Centers

Funding for North Dakota’s Clean Sustainable Energy Authority, including about $50 million in grants and loans, was “zeroed out” by the state legislature. Instead of funding clean energy or other environmentally-friendly technology, “officials said future dollars may go to projects that use natural gas supplied by a state-supported pipeline.”

In order to build a natural gas pipeline from Watford City to eastern North Dakota, the North Dakota Industrial Commission is giving a $500 million financial guarantee to WBI Energy.

WBI Energy, which is a subsidiary of MDU Resources Group, is involved in an eminent domain case that McKenzie County landowners have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At a meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Senator John Hoeven spoke about “linking” North Dakota’s coal plants with oil producers in the Bakken to use captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, a process which the Energy and Environmental Resource Center at UND estimates “could lead to an additional 5 billion to 8 billion barrels of oil from the Bakken Formation over the next 30 to 50 years.”

Total number of barrels of petroleum consumed by the U.S. in 2023: about 7.39 billion.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enhanced oil recovery provides tax credits for “secure geologic storage of CO2 in oil and gas fields”. In this case, where CO2 is captured from a coal plant, the credit is $85 per metric ton, according to the Carbon Capture Coalition.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that a mean of 8.4 billion metric tons of CO2 could be retained in reservoirs across the U.S.

The Bureau of Land Management awarded a lease to mine 18.3 million tons of coal in Mercer County at Freedom Mine. The lease sale was opposed by Earthjustice, Dakota Resource Council, and Fort Berthold POWER.

Basin Electric is set to build a $4 billion gas plant in Epping, northeast of Williston. The 1,470-megawatt Bison Generation Station will be North Dakota’s largest power plant. Officials from Basin Electric testified that the buildout of the new power plant “was not driven by data center demand.”

With new data centers being built and proposed in North Dakota, “There is probably a significant amount of generation that is going to have to get built out to service that,” explained Darcy Neigum, vice president of electric supply for MDU, suggesting that a “one-to-one match” between data centers and power plants may be necessary.

Some attendees at a town hall meeting in Harwood, where groundbreaking for a 280-megawatt data center is set to take place this month, shouted to make their voices heard from the crowd while calling the Applied Digital representatives or the town officials “criminals” and saying that “they sold us out.” 

As More Perfect Union has shown in their reports on YouTube, data centers can come with significant hidden costs, not only to your electric bill, but to your entire quality of life.

North Dakota's Department of Mineral Resources published the summer edition of their newsletter, Geo News. The newsletter includes articles on the topics of glacial geology, rare earth elements, and proppant sand (also known as frac sand):

  • “Boulders from the Field: Glacial Erratics as Landscaping Materials in North Dakota”

  • “Pinpointing Enrichment: Using New Data from Exploratory Drilling to Characterize the Distribution of Rare Earth Elements and Other Critical Minerals in North Dakota”

  • “Windblown Sand in the Williston Area Tested for Proppant Use”

ProPublica and North Dakota Monitor published a series by Jacob Orledge highlighting conflicts between mineral owners and oil companies:

Forest Service, BLM, and Other News

On September 3, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to overturn the Bureau of Land Management’s Resource Management Plans for North Dakota, Montana, and Alaska. Senator Kevin Cramer called the move “a significant step in canceling the Biden administration’s plan to restrict North Dakota’s energy development.”

North Dakota’s Resource Management Plan (RMP) was adopted in January 2025. An anonymous former BLM staffer spoke with Outdoor Life, saying that RMPs are “developed from the ground up, with people who live on and around these public lands helping direct the priorities of the agency. In my view, having a top-down, politically motivated decision like this is absolutely contrary to the local control that most conservatives say they want.”

David Willms, associate vice president for public lands at the National Wildlife Federation, said that canceling the RMPs in this manner “could jeopardize effective and balanced public land stewardship, set a terrible precedent, and may actually be illegal.”

John Bradley, executive director of the North Dakota Wildlife Federation, asked this crucial question: “A poll released this spring showed that 75% of North Dakotans are opposed to Congress taking this action. Why isn’t Congress listening?”

Nora Swenson