This week, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced a second round of oil and gas lease sales for public lands located in Utah and Nevada. The announcement was accompanied by the release of seven ‘memorandums of instruction’ (IMs) intended to guide leasing in light of the adoption of the Inflation Reduction Act and the continued absence of a long-promised formal update to oil and gas lease regulations. The announcement follows BLM’s October disclosure of planned sales in Wyoming, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
Pump jacks leased from oil and gas developers fragment habitat on public lands in Wyoming.
With nearly 325,000 acres in five states now eligible for lease in the spring of 2023, the BLM continues to move forward with largely unlimited oil and gas land leases on federal public lands despite the escalating crisis. climatic. The planned leases come as the agency has yet to implement promised regulatory reforms that it identified as priorities for action in a November 2021 report. And they also come before the agency does. has taken no public action to formalize the many tax reforms that Congress has passed into law. Inflation Reduction Act.
Instead, this week the BLM released seven MIs intended to guide the oil and gas program in the absence of new regulations as the agency continues to move forward with leasing under an outdated and seriously flawed regulatory regime. Broad in scope, the IMs essentially cover four major operational areas of the federal onshore oil and gas program:
- Implementation of tax reforms of the leasing program required under the Inflation Reduction Act, covering rent increases, increasing minimum bid amounts, “expression of interest” fees, higher royalties, ending non-competitive leases and how the agency will deal with Lawthe hostage provision, which ties wind and solar permits to the completion of oil and gas lease sales;
- Implementation of the recommended regulatory reforms contained in the agency’s November 2021 report, covering an approach to tackling the leasing of ‘low potential land’ and how the agency will approach the reinstatement of terminated leases;
- Refining previous guidelines that rolled back Trump-era practices affirm minimum public comment periods, the appropriate pool of parcels to be considered for lease, the agency’s lack of authority to offer non-competitive leases, and its authority to employ a formal process for nominating rental parcels; and
- Clarification of agency policy applicable to drilling authorizations (APD) and lease suspensions.
Passage of Inflation Reduction Act significantly changed historical onshore oil and gas leasing practices for the BLM by tying federal public land renewable energy permits to these lease sales. So, this week’s action by BLM to release early guidance on how it will address the added complexity created by Congress is certainly appreciated. However, there remains no obvious requirement – legal or otherwise – for the BLM to proceed with the preparation of oil and gas lease sales in the absence of updated regulations. And, given the Inflation Reduction ActBLM’s focus on investments in greenhouse gas reductions, BLM’s continued silence on how it could limit present and future emissions caused by its coal, oil and gas is obvious.
Thus, in order to realize the capital promise that was written in the Inflation Reduction Act, we continue our call for the agency to act immediately to implement the reforms it and key government watchdogs are calling for. These include:
- Formally implement, through the development of rules, the Inflation Reduction Actfiscal policy changes;
- End the practice of leasing land with little chance of development and improve transparency through better tribal consultation and public participation;
- Ensure that management of public lands by DOI and BLM meets the standards of conservation and stewardship required by law ensure that critical landscapes, wildlife and ecosystems remain protected in the future; and
- Incorporating a process to assess the climate emissions associated with individual oil and gas concessions and operations, assessing the cumulative climate impacts associated with expanding and continuing fossil fuel production.
If these reforms are not formalized, IMs newly released by the BLM risk being tossed in the trash by a subsequent administration. Our shared public lands simply cannot afford this kind of political whiplash and the extraordinary ecological and climate damage it can cause. to the landscapes and ecosystems we all depend on for clean water, clean air, health and general well-being.
