Hundreds of parcels of land in a massive 2022 Wyoming oil and gas lease sale are in limbo after a U.S. district court ruled last month that the Bureau of Land Management did not fully consider impacts from oil and gas operations on water quality and declining species populations and failed to demonstrate how it factored future greenhouse gas emissions into its decision to hold an auction.
In a separate but concurrent ruling issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Christopher Cooper agreed with the agency’s approach to analyzing the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from a broader set of lease auctions across the American West, and found that it was not possible for the agency to judge whether the emissions generated by oil and gas leases would have a “significant” impact on the environment.
While conservationists see the first case as a success, the oil and gas industry views the latter ruling as a “major win for onshore drilling.”
In Wilderness Society v. U.S. Department of the Interior, a narrower suit focused solely on 122 parcels covering almost 120,000 acres of land across Wyoming, the court sided with the environmental groups. In its judgment, it agreed that the agency had failed to “take a hard look at the environmental impacts” of the sale and explain how those factors influenced its decision.
Environmental groups hope this ruling could prompt the court to pause or withdraw some of some of the leases.
In Dakota Resource Council v. U.S. Department of the Interior, environmental groups across the West sued the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for conducting a “deficient” environmental analysis that did not consider the effects of fossil fuel emissions released by drilling on Western public lands. The court found that the BLM made “no legal error in [its] environmental analysis or its decision to approve” the sales. “Absent a government carbon budget or similar reference standard,” the agency could not reasonably determine if emissions from the leases would qualify as “significant.”
That ruling was a “significant victory,” said the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry trade group, in a statement released after the court’s decision.
A Win in Wyoming
“We really think this should be a wakeup call for the BLM,” said Alexandra Schluntz, a senior associate attorney for Earthjustice who represented the Wilderness Society, a conservation organization, and Friends of The Earth, an environmental lobbying organization, in Wilderness Society v. U.S. Department of the Interior.
“This case shows that the BLM has a lot of work to do to improve its process for leasing lands to oil and gas development, and improve how it’s analyzing and protecting the environment while it’s making those decisions,” she said.
Both organizations were concerned that the magnitude of the Wyoming sale, which offered over 40 times the area of the next largest auction in the West, would pollute nearby aquifers and sources of drinking water, upset critical habitats for mule deer and sage grouse—two of the state’s most iconic imperiled species—and exacerbate the volume of greenhouse gases Wyoming emits into the atmosphere.
“The adverse impacts from that sale to conservation values on the ground, and the estimated emissions and their associated costs, particularly to public land resources, were significant enough that we wanted to challenge the decision making and the legality of that sale,” said Ben Tettlebaum, director and senior attorney of the Wilderness Society.
To argue their points, the environmental groups pointed to a series of gaps they believed existed between the BLM’s environmental assessment and contemporary studies and data that showed unconsidered negative impacts from oil and gas development on water quality and wildlife.
For the most part, the court agreed. The environmental organizations had “raised credible concerns” with the BLM’s methods for assessing fracking well casings, including the agency’s decision to ignore evidence from a 2022 study that found “significant gaps in casing” in Wyoming wells near aquifers. The court found the BLM should have considered the study during its planning process, which it said suggested that the agency’s current approach to regulating the industry may not thoroughly protect aquifers from contamination.
When it came to analyzing the effects of increasing oil and gas development in sage grouse and mule deer habitats, the agency’s assessments “do not offer any insight into how a lease sale of this magnitude and in these particular…
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