PINEDALE - The gray sagebrush stalks pepper the space around the two yellow poles set back 100 yards from the road beneath the snow-capped Wind River Mountains in the distance.

Though a little compressed, the thousands of plants blend right in with the surrounding sea of sagebrush in southwest Wyoming's mighty Jonah gas field. It's hard to imagine that just last summer, a 100-ton drilling rig sat on top of that sage.

The sagebrush is springing back, thanks in part to a unique innovation developed by EnCana Oil and Gas Inc to protect wildlife habitat and sagebrush in the lucrative Jonah field.

The company has been employing a wooden mat drilling technology for the past three years on some of its Jonah wells. The brown, connected mats cover the prairie around the drilling rigs and the access roads much like a giant basketball court laid right on the sagebrush.

Instead of scraping and stripping away a foot of topsoil for new roads and well pads, EnCana workers lay down one to two acres of wooden mats for each of the well pads and connecting roadways.

Officials said the mats have decreased disturbance in EnCana drilling areas, in part because bulldozing the site normally displaces about three to four acres per well site and often severs the native sagebrush from its root systems.

The mats also hasten the revegetation of disturbed well sites. The sagebrush is flattened using the mat technique, but the advantage is that the root and seed systems stay intact, allowing for a quick grow-back period after the mats are removed.

The mat program - begun as a pilot demonstration program in the summer of 2005 at EnCana's Stud Horse Butte Well 124-20 - is working and has become a regular part of the company's reclamation efforts, said Randy Teeuwen, EnCana community relations adviser.

"It does work well, and it has pretty much done everything we thought it would," Teeuwen said.

"It's been more expensive than replanting and revegetating an area, but we felt it's very much worth the extra expense," he said. "It's been pretty impressive."

Linda Baker with the Upper Green River Valley Coalition commended EnCana for its effort.

"It's a great idea … as long as it works," Baker said.

"Whenever the industry does something progressive like that, especially where reclamation is concerned … whether watering or trying a different seed mix or trying to reduce their impacts in the first place … I think it's a great idea," she said. "That's really going to be the saving grace for that field if it's ever completed."

Mats and mats

The Jonah Field is an area of about 32,000 acres that's largely dominated by sagebrush, antelope and now energy development. The area is located about 30 miles southwest of Pinedale in Sublette and Sweetwater counties.

For years, EnCana has successfully used the wooden mat plank system to keep its million-dollar equipment from sinking into the spongy bog, or muskeg, found in the Canadian oil fields.

Teeuwen said it takes about 3,000 mats to fully cover a well site location. He said the company keeps about 12,000 mats on hand in the Jonah for the program, most of them moved from locations in Louisiana for the project.

Teeuwen said the key is protection of the sagebrush and other native vegetation root systems that are normally damaged during well pad drilling and production.

"The root structure stays intact because we don't disturb any of the topsoil or anything below the ground," he said. "The sagebrush kind of gets flattened out and maybe broken a little, but it springs right back."

Teeuwen said a layer of plastic laid between the mats and sagebrush has the added benefit of trapping moisture underneath. "Those mat locations green up really quick with that extra dose of moisture under there," he said.

EnCana's reclamation-to-disturbance ratio in the Jonah Field last year using wooden mat drilling was nearly 1-1. The company reclaimed about 700 acres in 2007 and disturbed about 631 acres.

"Our goal is actually to exceed that 1-1 ratio this year," Teeuwen said.

Bureau of Land Management rules prevent the use of mat drilling on any terrain with a more than 3 degree slope. But the company still plans to drill 20 wells from mat locations during the remainder of the year, he said.

Southwest Wyoming bureau reporter Jeff Gearino can be reached at 307-875-5359 or at gearino@tribcsp.com.