Biden administration accused of rubber-stamping dozens of Trump-era oil leases in Utah desert

WASHINGTON (CN) — An environmental group in Utah filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Biden administration’s decision to reaffirm 35 gas and oil leases in south-central Utah, including one that was previously enjoined by a federal judge.

By re-upping the Trump-era leases, the environmental group argues, the government puts at risk 333 different species who call the San Rafael desert home — 68 of whom only occur in the Canyonlands region of the Colorado Plateau — and the desert’s unique sand dune.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance brought the federal suit in the District of Columbia, asking a federal judge to declare arbitrary and vacate the Bureau of Land Management’s May decision.

The leases are located on BLM-managed public lands positioned between Goblin Valley State Park and the San Rafael Reef Wilderness to the west, and the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness, Horseshoe Canyon unit of Canyonlands National Park, and the Dirty Devil region to the east and south.

In the suit, the environmental group described the area within the desert as “one of the must sublime and least-traveled areas” in the state.

One of the reaffirmed leases, on protected public land in the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness, was sold in December 2018; the environmental group says the Trump administration rushed to issue it, and the lease took effect just days before the John Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act took effect on March 12, 2019.

Landon Newell, a staff attorney for the Alliance, decried the BLM’s decision under President Joe Biden not to reverse course from Trump.

“The Trump administration wrote the playbook on how to make an uninformed, illegal leasing decision. … Unfortunately, by reaffirming these leases — including in the heart of the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness — the Biden administration is blessing one of the Trump administration’s most controversial oil and gas leases,” Newell said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

The land bureau did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the Department of the Interior, a co-defendant in the suit.

Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, sent a letter to then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt asking that the lease be canceled, warning that allowing the development would “destroy [what] Congress sought to protect when it created the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness.”

Master leasing plan

Between 2010 and 2017, under the Obama administration, the BLM did not offer any public lands in the San Rafael desert region for oil and gas leasing or development. The administration said any lease would require new environmental analyses by the agency.

In 2020, one such analysis was ordered for lands in the desert, the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness and the lands encompassed by the leases at issue in Wednesday’s suit. In the fall of 2015, the BLM began preparing the draft environmental analysis, known as a “master leasing plan,” it had determined was necessary before any land could be leased out.

The agency abandoned the plan, however, soon after former President Donald Trump took office and issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to review actions that may burden oil and gas usage and development.

Had the leasing plan been completed, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance posits, the 35 oil and gas leases highlighted in the suit would have been significantly narrowed — if they had been granted at all.

Instead, following Trump’s order, the agency eliminated the master leasing plan concept; eliminated or restricted the public’s involvement in oil and gas leasing decisions; and decided to rely on existing environmental analyses rather than prepare new ones in order to “streamline” oil and gas leasing and development.

The agency began in July 2018 to offer hundreds of leases in federal lands, including the leases in the San Rafael desert.

Biden, upon taking office in January 2021, rescinded Trump’s “energy dominance agenda” and ordered a review of the BLM’s oil and gas leasing program. The Interior Department suggested reforms to better account for environmental harms and include communities in the decision-making process.

But the change in administration didn’t end the leases in the San Rafael desert region, prompting the environmental group to file a December 2020 lawsuit to block the development and drilling of the Labyrinth Canyon lease. U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras temporarily enjoined the project, but the Obama appointee ultimately allowed the development to move forward — although the well turned up dry.

To resolve that earlier suit, BLM agreed to review the Trump-era leasing decision, creating a supplemental leasing analysis that was the basis for the decision to reaffirm the 35 leases.

“Rather than closely scrutinizing the prior leasing decision, the BLM has rubber-stamped it,” the environmental group wrote in its suit.

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