Montana’s Northern Cheyenne Tribe is proposing water pollution restrictions that could force companies in the resource-rich Powder River Basin to spend more on cleanup efforts or face limits on where they can drill.

Companies operating in the basin along the Montana-Wyoming border pump billions of gallons of water annually from underground aquifers to free trapped coal-bed methane, or natural gas. That water is high in salts and often pumped straight into rivers, a potential threat to the crops of downstream farmers.


A federal lawsuit already is pending against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over coal-bed methane water restrictions approved last year for Montana.

Now the Northern Cheyenne Tribe wants to raise the bar even higher along the Tongue River, one of the major drainages in the Powder River Basin. The tribe’s proposal would be more than twice as stringent as the state restrictions during some months of the year.

...But industry representatives say energy companies are likely to balk at the new rules. If the market rebounds and the Northern Cheyenne plan is approved, companies would likely take their business elsewhere, said Monica Deromedi with the Coalbed Natural Gas Alliance in Cheyenne, Wyo.

“You could go to a basin where it’s much easier (to drill), where you don’t have nearly the rules and regulations that you do here,” she said