The Interior Department could face a fresh round of lawsuits after officials said Thursday they would no longer require the Bureau of Land Management to create an environmental impact statement for more than 3,200 oil and gas leases across seven states in the West.
That environmental review, which the Biden administration started work on four days before Trump took office in January, was the culmination of nearly a decade’s worth of lawsuits on federal leases that date back to the Obama administration. The leases cover 3.5 million acres across Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.
Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, said the work done by BLM to guard against environmental effects of oil and gas production on federal lands has been weak. He said court decisions and settlements underscored that claim. He also called Interior’s decision to walk back the environmental impact statement likely illegal.
“Trump is vulnerable to lawsuits over this, but this administration does not seem to care about the law one bit,” Nichols said. “It’s doing everything it can to avoid complying with the law so it can give away federal lands and minerals to the fossil fuel industry.”
The Center for Biological Diversity was not among the groups that sued over the Western leasing issue, Nichols said.
The legal saga began when groups including the WildEarth Guardians sued over federal lease sales held during the Obama administration, arguing BLM’s environmental reviews of leases did not take the climate impacts of oil and gas production into account.
Green groups continued filing suits voicing the same concerns during the Trump and Biden administrations, also arguing that the environmental reviews took only individual leases into account and ignored the cumulative environmental impact of leasing millions of acres for oil and gas development.
The Biden administration opted to settle most of those cases, and four days before Trump took office, BLM announced it would create an environmental impact statement that would cover 3,200-plus oil and gas leases. It wrote in the Federal Register that the statement would “provide a comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts from these leases, which have been remanded to BLM for further review, including the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions (to include the social cost of carbon) and other common impacts.”
In response to questions from POLITICO’s E&E News, Interior spokesperson J. Elizabeth Peace said that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is focused on advancing responsible energy development while removing unnecessary regulations.
“This action is about cutting red tape — not cutting corners. We’re committed to upholding environmental protections while also making the permitting process work for — not against — the American people,” Peace said in an email.
Legal challenges
The agency’s decision to forgo the multistate environmental review undertaken by the Biden administration still leaves BLM on the hook to do more environmental analysis of the challenged leases, said Kyle Tisdel, a senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, which represented environmental and public health groups opposing the lease sales.
“We obviously have multiple court decisions and settlement agreements that BLM has entered into that say they’ve got to do something,” Tisdel said.
It’s unclear at this point when litigation might be filed.
Nichols said the Center for Biological Diversity was looking at what steps they could take to either file new lawsuits or intervene legally.
“We’ll certainly fire back, but what that looks like, I don’t know,” Nichols said. “But climate change is real, and politics does not trump the reality here that more oil and gas leasing would be a disaster for the environment.”
The agency said in its announcement Thursday that it intends to evaluate its “options for compliance” under the National Environmental Policy Act.
BLM is “creating this void of process and a void of analysis, without really knowing what they are going to do to fill that void,” Tisdel said.
Since the underlying cases that spurred the Biden administration’s review are now closed, environmental groups will have to file new suits, Nichols said.
What that looks like will depend on how the Trump administration aims to fill that “void” of analysis, according to Tisdel.
If BLM tries to argue that it does not need to do a more rigorous NEPA review because of the administration’s recent decision to rescind the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s NEPA regulations, Tisdel said, that could be a potential target for litigation.
Another possibility could be litigation focused on applications for permits to drill on leases contested in the original lawsuits, Tisdel added.
“The Trump administration doesn’t have a tremendous amount of fidelity to the rule of law, and so whatever they’re going to say about it is going to be in line with their attempts at deregulation and their policy agenda around energy dominance and everything else,” Tisdel said.
The administration has countered that federal agencies are working to address an “energy emergency” Trump declared during his first day of office. In declaring the emergency, Trump cited the Biden administration’s policies, although oil and gas production reached record levels during Biden’s tenure in office.
A new look at leasing
In its Thursday announcement, Interior said that nixing the environmental impact statement is in line with executive and secretarial orders that have been issued since Trump took office in January.
Trump signed the Unleashing American Energy executive order on his first day in office, directing agencies to review all of their actions “that impose an undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources.”
Burgum signed a secretarial order in February that requires the department to review and rescind Biden-era policies and programs that could impede “the development and use of our Nation’s abundant energy and natural resources.”
Burgum’s order requires all assistant secretaries to prioritize reducing barriers to the use of federal lands for energy development; speed up the permitting process for drilling; and offer more parcels of public land for oil and gas leasing.
One of the country’s most influential oil and gas lobbies on Thursday expressed support for Interior’s action in a statement to E&E News.
“We welcome BLM’s ongoing efforts to restore certainty to the federal leasing process and unleash American energy dominance,” wrote Holly Hopkins, vice president of upstream policy for the American Petroleum Institute.
The New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, the North Dakota Petroleum Council and the Western Energy Alliance, a Colorado-based industry voice, did not immediately respond to requests from E&E News for comment. The Montana Petroleum Association declined to comment.
Environmental critics of the decision voiced concern that canceling additional environmental reviews could limit the participation of affected communities and curtail wildlife protections.
Scott Skokos, executive director of the Dakota Resource Council, called eliminating the environmental review “wild.” He also took aim at Burgum, a former governor of North Dakota who, Skokos said, aimed to emphasize responsible drilling while in state office.
“It’s just pretty embarrassing for me as a North Dakotan to see our former governor giving away our land without any analysis,” Skokos said, noting that some of the leases are in the Badlands region.
Peace, the Interior spokesperson, declined to respond to Skokos’ remarks.
Nichols with the Center for Biological Diversity said the U.S. is already producing record amounts of oil and gas — and that some oil companies seem unenthusiastic about snatching up federal leases. He pointed to federal lease sale in January offering parcels in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which received zero bids.
“There was so much leasing happening under the first Trump administration — there’s just not a lot left to lease,” Nichols said.
