The U.S. Bureau of Land Management owns more of Monterey County than meets the eye. Its holdings include underground mineral rights. Back in 2017, the BLM’s regional office undertook a planning process for its federal mineral estate, parts of which the agency routinely auctions off to leaseholders seeking the rights to drill.
The agency’s analysis settled on a preferred plan to auction off rights to 398,600 acres, but BLM instead adopted a more industry-friendly plan for 725,500 acres. In 2019, the Center for Biological Diversity and Sierra Club sued BLM in federal court. In 2020, Monterey County joined the nonprofits as a plaintiff, sparked in part by voter-approved Measure Z, which bans fracking – one grievance in the lawsuit is that BLM failed to analyze the potential impacts of fracking.
All of this came after a separate case in 2011, in which the court ordered a moratorium on leases in Monterey and Fresno counties without analyzing fracking. But new leadership meant a change of heart: “The Trump administration decided it would start doing leases again, and did a half-assed environmental review,” says Maya Golden-Krasner, deputy director at the Climate Law Institute of the Center for Biological Diversity.
On Dec. 6, the court approved a settlement agreement in which BLM commits to revisiting its analysis. (BLM declined to comment for this story.)
It’s unknown what the new analysis will find, but Golden-Krasner hopes it will shrink the oil industry footprint: “We think that if they actually do a thorough environmental review of the climate impacts, they would find there are just too many impacts, and on that basis they should stop issuing new leases.”