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Drilling Under New Wyoming Leases on Hold
as Judge Requires BLM to Reconsider Impacts
on Climate Change
April 16, 2019
A recent decision in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit has paused oil
and gas exploration and production activity in certain leased areas of Wyoming and hinted at heightened
requirements that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) must satisfy to comply with the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) before issuing oil and gas leases. Specifically, the decision will require
BLM to conduct a more thorough review of the potential climate change impacts of certain oil and gas
leases before allowing the lessees to conduct drilling operations.
The decision addresses five oil and gas lease sales for areas in Wyoming between May 2015 and August
2016 that resulted in BLM issuing 282 leases. BLM had determined that the lease sales did not require it
to issue an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which is a detailed evaluation of a federal action that
NEPA and its implementing regulations require for any federal action that will significantly affect the
quality of the human environment. Instead, BLM issued Environmental Assessments (EAs) that were
tiered to, i.e. incorporated, a resource management plan for the relevant area and an EIS, which BLM
had produced at the land use planning stage. Addressing how the leases would impact climate change on a
conceptual level, the EAs acknowledged that oil and gas drilling on the parcels to be leased would
cause Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. However, BLM did not attempt to quantify and project the
GHG emissions likely to result from the lease sales. The EAs noted that [t]he inconsistency in results of
scientific models ... limits the ability to quantify potential future impacts at this level. The EAs
concluded that the GHG emissions likely to result from each lease sale would not have a measurable
effect when compared to national or global emissions, or would represent only an incremental
contribution to regional and global GHG emissions. For each of the EAs, BLM issued a Finding of No
Significant Impact (FONSI), meaning that BLM did not require an EIS to issue the leases.
Non-profit groups, including WildEarth Guardians, challenged BLM's issuance of these leases, arguing
that NEPA required BLM to conduct a more piercing consideration of the consequences of oil and gas
drilling before it authorized the Wyoming Lease Sales. More specifically, Plaintiffs argue[d] that, by
issuing the EAs and FONSIs in conjunction with the Wyoming Lease Sales, BLM violated NEPA because
Congressional Research Service
https://crsreports.congress.gov
LSB10289
CRS Legal Sidebar
Prepared for Members and
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