Judge throws out 2-year-old sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf

A federal district judge threw out a Biden administration sale of oil and gas drilling rights in the Gulf, writing that the government failed to sufficiently analyze its possible effects on the climate and endangered whales, Bloomberg reports. 

What exactly happens to the two-year-old sale is still up for discussion, with U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington directing that additional arguments will be held to decide the sale’s fate. Possible options include invalidating leases or ordering contracts to be revised with additional limitations. 

Congress made approximately 73.3 acres in the Gulf available for sale as part of the Inflation Reduction Act and nearly three dozen companies including Chevron scooped up 299 leases for $250.6 million from a government auction in 2023. 

But Mehta says the Interior Department violated the National Environmental Policy Act by insufficiently analyzing the auction and that Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management didn’t fully consider potential energy market changes in its analysis of the potential greenhouse gas emissions that would result from activity on new oil and gas leases.

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