The Biden administration has told a court it will complete the next 5-year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing in December.
The deadline—an estimate, not a fixed commitment—was submitted in a court fight launched by 12 industry associations.
The trade groups acted because the Interior Department failed to create a new 5-year leasing plan before the expiration of the last plan in the middle of 2022. Interior issued a proposed new plan in early July with no timeframe for completing the plan, and since then Interior has been working through the regulatory procedural steps (OGJ Online, July 5, 2022).
The lawsuit, led by the American Petroleum Institute, serves as a goad to push Interior along. In a court brief filed Mar. 6, Interior provided details on the steps forward, partly through Justice Department attorneys but also in a document from Walter Cruickshank, deputy director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) within Interior.
Interior is developing and updating a variety of environmental impact calculations and must review a large volume of submitted comments, after which it can get a preliminary decision from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and publish a proposed final program in September, Cruickshank said.
That will be followed by a mandatory 60-day waiting period. After that, Interior is expected to complete the final plan and see Haaland approve it in December, Cruickshank said.
The court case is American Petroleum Institute v. Interior, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Warning shot
In a statement, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Interior was “putting their radical climate agenda ahead of our nation’s energy security,” a warning shot from a swing-vote senator in a closely divided Senate.
“I will remind the administration that the Inflation Reduction Act also prevents them from issuing any leases for renewables, like offshore wind or onshore solar, unless there are first reasonable lease sales for oil and gas that actually result in leases being awarded,” Manchin said. “And I will hold their feet to the fire on this.”
That was 4 days after Manchin said an inadvertently posted Interior internal memo revealed that Amanda Lefton, BOEM director at the time the memo was written, opposed the idea of moderating leasing fees for oil and gas companies in Cook Inlet, Ala., despite the importance of natural gas from Cook Inlet to Anchorage and other Alaska cities. Lefton based her opposition on concerns about climate change. Laura Daniel-Davis, principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, reportedly indicated on the memo that she agreed with Lefton.
“I am appalled by its contents,” Manchin said of the memo. “I will not support anyone who agrees with this type of misguided reasoning.”
President Biden has nominated Daniel-Davis to be Interior assistant secretary for land and minerals management. The internal memo and Manchin’s statement raise the possibility of the nomination being defeated if not withdrawn.
Before joining the Biden administration, Daniel-Davis was chief of policy and advocacy for the National Wildlife Federation. She is not the only Interior official with roots in environmental advocacy. The current director of the Bureau of Land Management, Tracy Stone-Manning, was an environmental activist who most recently worked as a senior adviser to the National Wildlife Federation. The current BOEM director, Elizabeth Klein, is an attorney who has made no secret of her hope to shift energy production away from fossil fuels. Haaland joined activist opposition to the Dakota Access crude oil pipeline before she won election to Congress in 2018 and in 2021 was nominated to be Interior secretary.
