What's the Hurry? Court Rejects Bush Administration's Rush for Oil and Gas at Arches N.P.

In a decision that the New York Times heralded as one of the country's two most important environmental victories of the year, a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in December 2002 that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) violated the National Environmental Policy (NEPA) when it authorized the Yellow Cat seismic project. Because of this decision, the BLM now will have to complete a proper environmental review before authorizing any additional seismic operations in the project area. The decision also creates a precedent requiring agencies to assess the impacts of energy development equipment on the land. This was the first time a federal court has had the opportunity to review a Bush administration-sponsored oil exploration project.

 

Editor's Note: Wildlands CPR is keeping an eye on the Bush administration's plans for energy development, because with resource extraction comes a maze of roads and traffic impacts. The seismic testing case described below was a major victory for roadfree wild places. For more information on seismic testing and its related road and ORV impacts, please see The Road-RIPorter 7(1):16-17.

Background

The BLM had approved a request by the world's largest seismic exploration company, WesternGeco, to explore for oil and gas in the Dome Plateau region outside of Moab, Utah, (just Act east of Arches National Park), also known as the Yellow Cat project area. The project area encompassed more than 23,000 acres of spectacular wildlands -- including proposed wilderness; the region also provides habitat for several threatened or endangered species, including the black-footed ferret, the bald eagle and the Mexican spotted owl. Exploration was to be done using vibraseis (popularly know as "thumper") trucks - 60,000 pound vehicles which cause immense impacts upon the land.

After the plaintiffs won a temporary stay of the BLM's decision to approve the Yellow Cat project, a divided panel of the Interior Board of Land Appeals upheld BLM's decision in late August 2002. After learning that WesternGeco was planning to return and finish the project in September, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club (we'll refer to all the groups collectively as SUWA) filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, D.C. to challenge the project.

In late October, the court issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the WesternGeco project so that it could consider the environmental groups' claims. On December 20, 2002, the court agreed with SUWA that BLM, by approving the exploration activity, had violated NEPA.

Plaintiffs' Claims

Attorneys for SUWA successfully argued that the BLM relied on an inadequate environmental assessment (EA) that failed to consider alternatives to the proposed seismic project. SUWA also provided evidence that the project would cause significant impacts to the human environment. In particular, SUWA noted that WesternGeco used thumper trucks to criss-cross sensitive desert soils, while vibrating the ground at regular intervals to record seismic information about oil deposits. Thumper trucks cause the same type of damage as off-road vehicles do in arid environments -- they ravage fragile cryptobiotic soils and cause ecological damage from which it can take as many as 300 years for the desert to recover. Because the court concluded that the BLM had failed to analyze any alternatives to the proposed action, it did not rule on the adequacy of the analysis of the ecological damage thumper trucks cause, but these impacts are mentioned in the decision. The BLM appealed the court's decision but chose to dismiss the appeal last month.

Just the Beginning

The Bush Administration has been pushing federal land managers to "fast-track" development on public lands across the West, allegedly to bolster U.S. energy security. Last year, the BLM released a blueprint memo outlining their strategy to open up public lands for oil and gas exploration and drilling. In another memo, released earlier in 2002, the BLM told federal land managers in Utah that oil and gas lease applications coming into the agency should be considered "priority number one." With this mandate in place, we can expect this case and other energy cases to be regularly tested in court over the next couple of years.

SUWA and its conservation partners were represented by SUWA staff attorney Steve Bloch, NRDC senior staff attorney Sharon Buccino, and Katherine Meyer & Tanya Sanerib from the D.C. based law firm of Meyer & Glitzenstein.

- Steve Bloch is a staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.