A federal district court froze development of a 5,000-well oil and gas project on federal lands in Wyoming after it determined the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) may have underestimated that project’s impact on groundwater.
The US District Court for the District of Columbia found that BLM miscalculated the storage of local aquifers by a factor of 10,000 when it conducted its environmental review for the Converse County Oil and Gas Project.
BLM used a Groundwater Model Report to assess the project’s effect on groundwater supplies. The plaintiffs in the case, Powder River Basin Resource Council and Western Watersheds Project, claim that BLM’s environmental report “was rife with errors,” causing a “serious underestimation of drawdowns.”
BLM’s model erroneously used a specific storage value of 0.001, rather than 0.00001, which minimized the risk of groundwater drawdown, the court found. It added that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s review of the draft BLM environmental assessment also found that BLM used “what appears to be an unrepresentatively high specific storage value (by at least an order of magnitude.)”
The court remanded the environmental impact assessment for further analysis and cautioned that it could decide to vacate the entire project based on the result.
“As both the EPA and plaintiffs explain, the drastically higher specific storage value used by BLM may have resulted in ‘substantial underestimation’ of groundwater drawdown,” the court wrote. “The court will therefore [halt] further [drilling permits] … while it decides whether to vacate the Project approval pending remand.”
The state of Wyoming intervened in the case, along with two energy companies—Devon Energy Production Co. LP and Continental Resources Inc.—in support of BLM’s approval of the project, located on 1.5 million acres of brushland near the borders of Nebraska and South Dakota. The Converse County Oil and Gas Project, which calls for 500 wells/year for 10 years, was approved in the waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency. At the time, BLM estimated the project would create about 8,000 jobs and $28 billion in federal revenue.