An analysis put together for a group opposed to oil and gas exploration on the Rocky Mountain Front shows that 99 percent of the people who commented on a recent study want the Front to remain off-limits to drilling.

The Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front reported on Wednesday that of the 49,180 comments submitted for an Environmental Impact Statement on the Startech Energy exploration proposal, their analysis shows that 49,064 of those comments were in opposition to the proposed action.

Of the 1,493 Montanans who submitted comments, 1,392 — or 93 percent — were opposed to the exploration activity.

One of the comments came from Teton County resident Roger Kelly.

"The area from MT (highway) 200 to U.S. (highway) 2 is priceless," he wrote. "No amount of oil or gas is worth developing this area. … Please put a stop to this development once and for all."

While the number of comments was "huge," in the words of Chris Mehl, a spokesman for the Wilderness Society — which is part of the coalition — he also acknowledged that the bulk of those comments came in as form letters.

So the coalition looked deeper into the comments, and separated those that were "unique comments," which means that someone wrote down, in their own words, whether they supported or opposed the exploratory drilling.

And of those 2,441 "unique comments," 2,325 — or 95 percent — were opposed to the proposed action, Mehl said.

"So even if you take out those comments that weren't unique, you still have an incredibly large number of people who are passionate about this place and said to protect it," Mehl said.

He added that if the comments weren't clearly for or against the proposed action, they were not placed in the support column in an effort to be "above board" with the supporting numbers.

"We didn't want anyone to be able to say that we took those in the gray areas for ourselves," Mehl said. "And when you consider that even when doing that, 99 percent were opposed, I think that says a lot about the bond that people feel for this land."

The 100-mile long Rocky Mountain Front is north of Helena near Choteau, where the wide-open plains swoop into the Rocky Mountains. It's home to a few ranchers who are outnumbered by the elk, grizzly and bighorn sheep that roam the area.

Startech Energy Inc., based in Calgary, Alberta, has leases from the 1970s that could allow drilling three wells in the Blind Horse Outstanding Natural Area west of Bynum, on public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management in the Blackleaf Canyon.

The leases predate the Outstanding Natural Area designation, and the EIS is being done to gauge the expected impacts under a variety of scenarios, ranging from full development to none.

The proposal calls for the first well to be drilled vertically about 6,500 feet, with the other two wells drilled out from the same site to fully develop the anticipated natural gas reservoir.

The project covers four acres for a 400-by-400-foot pad to accommodate the drilling rig and production equipment. In addition, a rugged road would be upgraded and eight miles of new pipeline installed. The project would cross private property and land managed by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, about 75 miles northwest of Great Falls in Teton County.

Startech officials said in the past that if the wells are productive, they would restart other existing wells in the area. The wells also could lead to additional development in the future, although more environmental reviews would be necessary.

Maxim Technologies in Helena is putting together the EIS on the project, which is expected to cost at least $1.2 million, for the BLM. A draft EIS is scheduled to be released in February 2005, with the final EIS and Record of Decision being issued later that fall.

Lynn Ricci, EIS team leader for the Blackleaf project, said they're still on schedule. She has her own 40-member group analyzing the comments, but noted that they don't tally them in the same fashion as the Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front.

"We don't break down the comments" as pro or con, Ricci said. "We look for major concerns and issues about the resources and how we can hopefully address them in the alternatives we'll put out in the draft EIS.

"We are strictly looking for substantive comments on potential impacts to resources, not whether people are for or against a project."

She noted that their "scoping report," which is a document that breaks down issues they'll be looking at by category in the EIS, is in draft form at this time.

"We have 80 some categories, like wildlife, economic impacts, and access issues, in the scoping report," Ricci said.