"Editorial: Feds study gas damage; isn't that something?"

"Editorial: Feds study gas damage; isn't that something?" - Santa Fe New Mexican:

"It isn't as if governmental bosses have suffered a surge of concern over harvesting coal and its gaseous by-product in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico and other stretches of the West. The energy bill approved by Congress in 2005 said such a study was to have been completed within a year. But such is the resistance from today's Washington to the likes of Congress that some environmental groups sued the Interior Department earlier this year to get its agencies off the dime.

The concern about coal-bed methane has to do with the way it's produced — by pumping out groundwater that traps the gas down in coal seams. Once the gas is extracted, the leftover water is injected into the ground, in New Mexico's case, or run into rivers up in Wyoming and southeastern Colorado. "