Date: 05-Feb-09
Country: US
Author: Ayesha Rascoe
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Interior Department on Wednesday canceled leases held by energy companies for oil and natural gas drilling on 130,000 acres of federal lands in Utah.
"I have directed (the department's) Bureau of Land Management not to accept the bids," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters on a conference call.
He said the department would return to the companies the $6 million in bids on the contested parcels of land and would reassess the decision to open these lands to energy exploration.
A U.S. District Court temporarily blocked the department from finalizing the lease sale held in December by the Bush administration, which included land adjacent to national parks, in response to a lawsuit from environmental groups.
The groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, charged in their complaint that opening the proposed areas to oil and gas development would lower air quality at several Utah national parks.
The groups said the Bureau of Land Management did not complete a thorough analysis of the environmental impact of the leases, as mandated by federal regulations.
"This is the first critical step in restoring balance to managing the public lands," said Sharon Buccino, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We had in the last administration an approach that really elevated energy development ... to the dominant use of public land, to the exclusion of a lot of other important values."
In a decision issued in January, District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina said the court granted the temporary restraining order because it was likely the groups' lawsuit would succeed as the Interior Department did not assess air pollution concentrations.
Federal law requires the department to prepare an environmental impact statement before issuing energy leases. Urbina said the groups' claim that the department cannot rely on environmental statements that lack air pollution and ozone level statistics would probably stand.
(Editing by Walter Bagley)
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