Federal judge remands BLM Wyoming leases, orders climate studies

A federal judge ruled that the US Bureau of Land Management did not adequately consider potential climate impacts when it issued oil and gas leases in Wyoming in 2015 and 2016, remanded the leases to the US Department of the Interior agency, and ordered it to conduct further studies.

“Having reviewed the record and the relevant law, the court concludes that—withholding judgment on whether BLM’s leasing decisions were correct—BLM did not sufficiently consider climate change when making those decisions,” Judge Rudolph Contreras of US District Court for the District of Columbia said in his Mar. 20 opinion.

“BLM summarized the potential on-the-ground impacts of climate change in the state, the region, and across the country. It failed, however, to provide the information necessary for the public and agency decision-makers to understand the degree to which the leasing decisions at issue would contribute to those impacts. In short, BLM did not adequately quantify the climate change impacts of oil and gas leasing,” Contreras said.

But the judge stopped short of vacating the leases outright by enjoining BLM from issuing drilling permits while the agency works to complete environmental assessments (EA) and findings of no significant impact (FONSI) that consider possible climate consequences more thoroughly.

“Obviously, we’re disappointed that the judge threw out decades of legal precedent in this ruling,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance, which intervened against the WildEarth Guardians and other groups’ lawsuit. Environmental analysis for oil and gas under the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA] has always been phased, she noted.

“Since it’s impossible to know at the leasing stage how many wells will be developed on the leases, or even if they will be developed at all, the analysis requirements at the leasing stage are different than subsequent analysis once actual projects and numbers of wells are proposed,” Sgamma said.

‘Failed to take hard look’

In his opinion, Contreras said that “the challenged EAs failed to take a hard look at the climate change impacts of oil and gas drilling because the EAs (1) failed to quantify and forecast drilling-related [greenhouse gas] emissions; (2) failed to adequately consider GHG emissions from the downstream use of oil and gas produced on the leased parcels; and (3) failed to compare those GHG emissions to state, regional, and national GHG emissions forecasts, and other foreseeable regional and national BLM projects.

“By asserting that these crucial environmental analyses are overly speculative at the leasing stage and more appropriate for later, site-specific assessments, BLM risks relegating the analyses to the ‘tyranny of small decisions.’ NEPA is intended to avert that outcome,” he wrote.

“Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land before irretrievably committing to that drilling,” Contreras said.

Remanding instead of vacating the leases is the most appropriate action because Wildlife Guardians and other plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenged only one aspect of nine lease sales that otherwise complied with NEPA, the judge continued. “BLM’s NEPA violation consists merely of a failure to fully discuss the environmental effects of those lease sales; nothing in the record indicates that on remand the agency will necessarily fail to justify its decisions to issue EAs and FONSIs,” he said.

Sgamma said that BLM under the Obama Administration did the correct level of GHG analysis at the leasing stage, and Contreras has failed to acknowledge that there are multiple NEPA rounds that are required before any development can occur, which will get to that well-specific GHG impact.

“The judge is asking BLM to take a wild guess at how many wells would be developed on these leases and analyze GHG impacts for wells that will never be developed,” she said. This ruling, with its overreaching halt to drilling permits and repudiation of decades of precedent, is ripe for successful appeal. Western Energy Alliance has been an active intervenor defending leasing in the case, and we will continue to do so as this ruling is appealed.”