Well Water in Converse County: The 5,000-Well Oil and Gas Project

A 5,000-well project on 1.5 million acres, approved in 2020

In December 2020, the Bureau of Land Management approved the Converse County Oil and Gas Project, authorizing up to 5,000 new oil and gas wells and associated infrastructure across roughly 1.5 million acres in the southern Powder River Basin, mostly on private surface with federal subsurface mineral rights -- a textbook split-estate arrangement at an unusually large scale. The project area sits between Douglas and Glenrock, overlapping much of the same Converse County land the hub describes as central to the state's current horizontal-drilling boom.

The groundwater lawsuit: twice vacated, still unresolved

The Powder River Basin Resource Council and Western Watersheds Project sued the U.S. Department of the Interior and BLM in September 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing BLM's environmental review violated the National Environmental Policy Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Mineral Leasing Act. On September 13, 2024, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that BLM's approval was unlawful because its groundwater modeling used an erroneous "specific storage value" -- a technical parameter measuring how much water an aquifer releases under pressure -- that grossly underestimated how much the project's drilling would deplete groundwater in the area. The court vacated BLM's environmental impact statement and record of decision.

That wasn't the end of it. In a February 2026 opinion, Judge Chutkan identified a second, independent NEPA deficiency in BLM's revised analysis: a failure to adequately analyze reasonable alternatives to the project as approved. As of this writing, the litigation remains ongoing, and -- notably -- BLM began approving individual drilling permits within the project area again in August, despite the court's prior ruling against the underlying approval. Industry groups have separately challenged aspects of the court's rulings. The practical reality for anyone with land or a well in the project footprint: this is not settled, resolved litigation you can treat as closed, and the on-the-ground drilling activity has not stopped while the legal question of adequate groundwater review remains open.

What a groundwater-modeling error actually means for a domestic well

The specific defect the court identified isn't abstract: an aquifer's "specific storage value" determines how much its water level drops for a given amount of water removed from it. If BLM's modeling used a value that understated real-world aquifer behavior, the agency's approval likely understated how much cumulative drilling-related water use (well drilling itself uses water, and produced water from oil and gas wells can also affect local aquifers) would lower groundwater levels regionally -- which is exactly the kind of impact that can show up years later as a domestic well running dry, needing to be drilled deeper, or losing pressure, especially in a shallower or already-marginal aquifer.

This doesn't mean every well in Converse County is at risk, or that the project's ultimate groundwater impact will necessarily be worse than BLM's original estimate -- the litigation is specifically about whether the agency's analysis was legally adequate, not a separate scientific finding of actual, confirmed depletion at any specific well. But it does mean the county's groundwater situation in the project area carries more documented uncertainty than a typical rural Wyoming parcel, and that uncertainty comes from a federal court's own finding, not activist speculation.

Before you buy or rely on a well here

1. Ask directly whether the parcel falls inside the Converse County Oil and Gas Project area (roughly the land between Douglas and Glenrock) -- the Bureau of Land Management Wyoming office and Converse County Planning can help confirm boundaries.
2. Check the current status of Powder River Basin Resource Council v. U.S. Department of the Interior directly (via PACER, the BLM's own project litigation updates, or the Powder River Basin Resource Council's public case tracking) before assuming the litigation's outcome -- it was still unresolved as of this writing.
3. For an existing well, get its drilling log, static water level history, and any production or yield records if available -- a documented baseline before nearby drilling activity intensifies is far more useful than trying to establish one after a problem shows up.
4. If you have concerns about a specific well's vulnerability, the Wyoming State Engineer's Office handles groundwater interference complaints and can advise on the process for investigating and remedying a well affected by nearby development.
5. Ask any prospective driller or lessee for their specific plans regarding water use and produced-water handling near your well, separate from whatever the federal environmental review ultimately requires -- surface use agreements under Wyoming's Split Estate Act can address water-related terms directly even while the broader federal litigation continues.