The Biden administration announced Friday that government regulators for the first time will start to comprehensively analyze greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas lease sales on federal lands in a move that could forestall drilling.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management said it would defer offering oil and gas leases on some western public lands that had been scheduled to go up for auction in early 2022 while it completes environmental assessments that analyze greenhouse gas emissions and consider their social cost.
While full details of the environmental assessments are still unknown, the move is a step toward the Biden administration’s goal of reforming the leasing system by raising costs on producers and imposing stricter regulatory requirements.
“The BLM is committed to responsible development on public lands, including ensuring that our environmental reviews consider the climate impacts of energy development on lands and communities,” said BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning.
As part of the announcement, BLM released a report finding oil, gas, and coal extraction from federal lands produced more than 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases last year, about one-fifth of all U.S. energy-related emissions.
Federal agencies previously have conducted reviews of potential greenhouse gas emissions from individual lease sales following court orders, but those often showed emissions to be small relative to a global scale, said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center.
Now, the Interior Department will begin to evaluate the cumulative impact of emissions from oil and gas leasing on public lands in multiple states, which would show a larger effect.
“They are doing in many respects precisely what we have been asking them to do, which is to not move forward with piecemeal analysis of individual lease sale and its greenhouse gas emissions implications,” Schlenker-Goodrich told the Washington Examiner. “What BLM has never done is complete a comprehensive analysis of the climate implications of the federal public lands oil and gas program.”
While its state offices conduct environmental assessments, BLM is deferring an unknown number of acres from lease sales in early 2022 that had been scheduled across 740,000 acres, primarily in Wyoming and Colorado, but also Montana, North and South Dakota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.
The Interior Department had scheduled those lease sales in response to a court ruling by a federal judge that found the Biden administration had acted illegally when it indefinitely paused new oil and gas leases.
The Biden administration is appealing the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, but it also committed to restart leasing during the appeals process.
Oil and gas industry groups said the Interior Department’s latest move to slow the leasing process as it conducts stricter environmental reviews is ill timed when the world is facing an energy supply crunch and rising prices.
“Creating uncertainty around the future of US energy development while simultaneously looking to OPEC to meet the nation’s energy needs is a deeply flawed policy that will saddle American families with higher energy costs, jeopardize our energy security and diminish U.S. energy leadership,” said Bethany Aronhalt Williams, spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute.
Kevin Book, managing editor of ClearView Energy Partners, a research group, compared the Interior Department’s move to action it is already taking to slow-walk oil and gas development in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge..
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The Interior Department is doing a new environmental review on drilling in a small section of the 19.3 million-acre refuge, known as the “1002 area,” where billions of barrels of oil are believed to lie beneath the coastal plain, as it considers impacts from greenhouse gas emissions in a process that could take more than a year.
“They are getting closer to a world where they are trying to use environmental reviews to come up with reasons not to greenlight fossil fuel leasing,” Book told the Washington Examiner. “The playbook is well established.”