To a group responsible for much of the state's energy production, the U.S. Secretary of Interior said Wednesday that there must be a balance between development and conservation. Since taking the office, former Idaho governor Dirk Kempthorne said he's strived to achieve it.

"This is particularly important in Wyoming where you have two world-class resources, energy and wildlife," Kempthorne said in Casper during the first of a three-day visit to the state. "That's significant."

In the past five years though, he said that the Bureau of Land Management has quadrupled the number of processed permits annually for onshore drilling for oil and gas in Western states. That includes Wyoming, the nation's top onshore energy producer.

Kempthorne told those gathered for the Petroleum Association of Wyoming annual meeting that energy companies have in that same time strived to lower their collective impact on the land being developed.

"Our work is paying off because the Wyoming energy industry has already greatly reduced impact on wildlife compared to practices just five years ago," he said during a morning speech at the Parkway Plaza. "By consolidating roads and pipelines and production facilities, by using directional drilling and reducing truck traffic, we've seen overall reduction in the development footprint."

Sometimes, Kempthorne said, the Department of the Interior has been called the Department of Everything Else. As the man who heads it, Kempthorne said he must protect interests that stretch across one-fifth of the nation's land, from the 470 million who annually visits its parks and forests, to the developers who draw one-third of the nation's domestic energy from it.

"One of the most urgent challenges of the Interior is to increase domestic energy production by increasing the access to federal areas that have good potential for oil, for gas and for coal, and to do it with an adherence to the highest of environmental standards," he said. "I appreciate your working with us in ways that we can show Americans that we are serious about protecting wildlife habitats while providing energy. They are not mutually exclusive."

It is a state as well as a federal challenge, Gov. Dave Freudenthal said during a speech later in the day. The conundrum came up during a few conversations he had recently, he said, at a Rock Springs crawfish boil.

"I was encouraged as governor to keep all of that drilling going in Jonah, but by God there better be a place for me to hunt and fish and recreate on the weekend," Freudenthal recalled. "As they pointed out to me, they have better jobs then they've had in a long time. They're making good money, they're buying better toys and they need a place to use 'em. It was a very interesting conversation.

"If that's not an encapsulation of what Wyoming is about right now, which is, 'We want really good jobs, we want them for a while, for a long time if we can have 'em but oh by the way governor can you keep a little niche over there for scenery. And everyone wants a different part of the state kept."

Contact reporter Cory Matteson at (307) 266-0589 or cory.matteson@casperstartribune.net.