Lawsuit Challenges First Offshore Oil Sale of New Trump Administration

Washington, D.C. —

Gulf and environmental groups sued the Trump administration today over its decision to hold an offshore oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico despite blatant violations of the law and threats to coastal communities and endangered wildlife.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) plans to hold an 80-million-acre Gulf oil sale on December 10. In finalizing the offshore oil sale, BOEM announced that it would no longer comply with one of our nation’s bedrock environmental laws — the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — prior to conducting this and 29 additional planned sales in the Gulf through 2040 under the 2025 Reconciliation Act. But the Act does not exempt any offshore lease sales from NEPA.

By failing to comply with NEPA, BOEM is now proceeding without analyzing how this sale of public waters could expose the entire Gulf region to catastrophic oil spills, harm endangered Rice’s whales, and leave behind a dangerous legacy of defunct oil wells, pipelines, and platforms. BOEM also failed to consider how Gulf communities could be harmed by the massive oil sale, even though earlier this year the Department of Justice guaranteed a federal court that the Trump administration would do so.

The groups are asking the court to mitigate the worst harms from the sale by preventing the issuance of leases and halting on-the-ground activities for any leases associated with the sale until BOEM complies fully with the law.

Earthjustice brought the lawsuit on behalf of Friends of the Earth, and Healthy Gulf. The Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Sierra Club are also parties and co-counseling in the suit.

“BOEM’s decision to ignore NEPA on this radical expansion of oil and gas leases in the Gulf sets a dangerous precedent for all environmental decisions across America. Opening 80 million acres of leases in the Gulf with no public comment will create irreparable harm to the Gulf’s ecosystems, endangered species, working waterfronts, and communities,” said Healthy Gulf Executive Director Martha Collins. “We do not need more offshore drilling at a time when frontline communities already suffer from the historic neglect of the oil and gas industry. The federal government needs to come to the Gulf region to uphold their obligation to public input through NEPA and allow the people of the Gulf Coast to be heard.”

“If you’re going to auction off 80 million acres of our public waters to the oil industry, the least you can do is not break the law in a plethora of ways as you do it,” said Earthjustice senior attorney George Torgun. “These are the very environmental laws that Congress passed decades ago in response to the destructive consequences of offshore oil drilling. It adds insult to injury that the Trump administration dismisses the serious harm this massive oil-and-gas sale could bring to our most critically endangered whale species while it tries to shut down offshore wind development by saying more environmental review is needed.”

“If you are feeling a sense of déjà vu, it’s because we are again finding ourselves with no other choice than to sue the federal government over another unlawful lease sale,” said Hallie Templeton, Legal Director for Friends of the Earth. “Whether it’s ignoring social, environmental justice impacts for nearby communities or disregarding the serious risks to an almost-extinct whale species, the government has blatantly disregarded the law. Not only that, but it has undertaken seriously questionable ethics along the way. So we’re taking the Trump Administration back to court, and as always, we are keeping a close eye on federal policy in this space.”  

“Opening 80 million acres in the Gulf is a recipe for more spills, more carbon pollution, and more damage to coastal communities and marine life,” said Irene Gutierrez, Senior Attorney at NRDC, “This sale is proceeding without basic environmental review and has the weakest safeguards we’ve seen in years, and is a step backward on climate, clean energy, and a livable future.”

“Trump’s plan to auction off millions of acres of our public waters to Big Oil is a wholesale assault on Gulf communities and endangered marine wildlife. If the industry can’t clean up the decaying oil platforms and thousands of idle wells already littering the Gulf, it shouldn’t be allowed to drill new wells,” said Rachel Mathews, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Oceans Program. “This massive expansion of offshore drilling will come with a toxic deluge of new spills. Oil industry executives will get richer, and the endangered Rice’s whale and people working and living on the Gulf Coast will pay a terrible price.”

“Once again, the Trump administration is ignoring the law so it can sell off our public lands and waters,” said Devorah Ancel, Senior Attorney with Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. “Offshore drilling has devastating consequences for coastal ecosystems, wildlife, and communities, and with this lease sale, the Trump administration has designed one of the riskiest, dirtiest, and most ethically questionable sales in recent memory. We’re taking them to court – again – because no administration gets to pick and choose which laws it follows and which it flouts.”

Background

The Trump administration’s decision to hold the December sale without NEPA compliance upends decades of precedent that offshore lease sales are subject to NEPA’s environmental review and public comment process.

NEPA was signed into law in 1970 by President Richard Nixon in the wake of the massive 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. For more than 50 years, NEPA has required federal agencies to engage with communities, analyze a project’s potential environmental harms, and disclose those potential harms to the public before approving that project. During this time, the Interior Department has consistently acknowledged that offshore lease sales are subject to NEPA’s environmental review and public disclosure requirements.

With this upcoming sale, the Trump administration has failed to analyze the impact this massive Gulf oil sale could have on the critically endangered Rice’s whale. But Gulf offshore oil operations are directly related to the decimation of the Rice’s whale population to the point where losing even one breeding female could spur the end of the species, which would be the first human-caused extinction of a large whale species in recorded history. Meanwhile, in other contexts — like its decisions to pause or cancel approved offshore wind developments — the Trump administration has cited factors like potential harm to North Atlantic right whales (though the National Marine Fisheries Service states on its website that there “are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities”). 

The Trump administration also failed to evaluate the risk of catastrophic oil spills that could devastate ecosystems, Gulf communities, and local industries like fishing and tourism. That risk has risen with every recent Gulf lease sale as oil companies are pushing into deeper, riskier waters — with over 60 percent of new industry bids in the last five sales going for deep or ultra-deepwater areas. And prior lease sales are now materializing into proposals for new high-risk, ultra-deepwater projects, such as BP’s “Kaskida” project, which would need to rely on still-emerging technology to extract oil under extreme conditions. (The Trump administration is currently considering approving Kaskida despite the urging by Members of Congress to reject it due to significant red flags with the proposal and risks that approving it would bring to the Gulf.) And the Trump administration failed to analyze how this sale will intensify the damaging impacts of the aging, growing number of unplugged wells and defunct platforms that litter the ocean.

As the Trump administration prepares to hold its massive offshore lease sale, the oil industry is already sitting on more than 2,000 active leases spanning a little over 12 million acres of offshore territory in the Gulf. Yet over 80 percent of those active leases have yet to start producing oil and gas. And the U.S. is already producing more oil than any nation in history, the majority of which gets exported.

Yet the hand-outs to the fossil fuel industry does not end in the Gulf: the Trump administration reportedly plans to expand offshore drilling all across the country, including in California, where federal offshore oil sales have not been held for decades, and in virtually all of Alaska’s offshore areas. Meanwhile, the Trump White House continues to seek to end other forms of cheaper, cleaner energy such as solar and wind, including by cancelling grants and projects that were already appropriated by Congress and approved by federal agencies.