A mistake in the federal documents offering public land in Wyoming for oil and gas leases has Cowboy State residents and environmentalists questioning whether government agencies are prepared to handle President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced in July that it was offering fossil fuel companies lease sales on 284 parcels across nearly 380,000 acres of Wyoming’s federal lands under its quarterly oil and gas lease program. The acreage offered for lease is the second-largest for Wyoming since 2016.
By law, the BLM must conduct an environmental assessment and review all parcels that could potentially be leased, using “preference criteria” that include a parcel’s development potential and its impacts on fish and wildlife habitat. In its analysis, the agency said it determined that all parcels had a “high preference” for leasing. But the BLM backed up that statement with a table of different parcels evaluated for the previous quarter’s auction, leaving some environmental groups to wonder whether the agency had analyzed the parcels offered during the current quarter at all.
“We consider that [mistake] to be a fatal flaw” in the lease sale, said Aimee Delach, director of energy and biodiversity at Defenders of Wildlife.
A BLM spokesperson said the agency conducted a preference analysis for all the fourth-quarter parcels, and that the list of third-quarter lease offerings “inadvertently carried over.”
“A member of the public pointed out the issue, which shows how valuable public input is in helping us maintain accuracy and transparency,” the spokesperson said.
The Trump administration has proposed cutting the public input opportunities for quarterly lease sales by nearly 90 percent.
The BLM said it will share an updated list of parcels before leases are awarded.
The agency’s misstep occurred as the Department of the Interior revises the BLM’s oil and gas rules, implemented under President Joe Biden, which reformed oil and gas royalty rates, raised bond requirements for cleanup funds and put conservation on equal footing with resource development. Among other changes, the revised rules would scrap preference criteria analysis.
“The administration is putting fossil fuel companies first, not the local communities or the public interest,” said Julia Stuble, the Wyoming state director for The Wilderness Society. “There’s gonna be more well pads where we used to enjoy the freedom of open spaces. I don’t think that’s something that most people in Wyoming or across the nation want to see.”
Many of the parcels in the Wyoming fourth-quarter auction are located in the Red Desert, a vast bowl of sagebrush steppe threaded with big game migration corridors and home to some of the world’s best habitat for sage-grouse, an iconic and threatened Western bird.
Sage-grouse are sensitive to environmental disturbances, and their long-term population declines have been linked to oil and gas drilling for decades. “Every time you put a new drilling rig on the landscape, you are affecting sage-grouse habitat at a radius far beyond just where that drilling rig is,” Delach said.
Sage-grouse are not the only species Wyoming environmental groups are worried about. Mule deer, elk and pronghorn all rely on the Red Desert, and grasslands they graze in the state’s northeastern corner, south of Gillette, have a concentration of lease offerings, too.
“Acreage in the last year has demonstrably increased quarter over quarter,” said Matt Gaffney, the Wyoming Outdoor Council’s legal and government relations director. “Because of that large volume of acreage, we’re seeing increased conflict with wildlife habitat.”
Some observers say the increase in parcels and acreage offered by the federal government appears to be more than the BLM can handle.
“The agency is making more mistakes within the leasing analysis after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year,” Stuble said. That law mandated the BLM increase oil and gas lease offerings on public lands. “If you’re seeing a series of mistakes, you have to ask what’s going on at the agency.”
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And while the Trump administration is requiring more public land be opened to fossil fuel extraction, its Department of Government Efficiency slashed the workforce at agencies that oversee that process, and other workers left voluntarily. An Inside Climate News analysis of federal workforce data found the BLM lost 23 percent of its staff in the first year of the second Trump administration.
“We can’t speak to the effects of staffing changes, but we can say confidently that our work has continued without missing a beat,” the BLM spokesperson said.
Under the Trump administration’s revised oil and gas lease rules, a preference criteria analysis like the one at issue would no longer be required for quarterly lease auctions, a change opponents say would hurt the public. The proposed rule would also reduce public participation timeframes from 90 days to 10.
Royalty rates, money that the federal government collects on behalf of Americans to allow companies to drill on public land, would decrease from 16.67 percent to 12.5 percent. Those royalties are split with state and local governments.
Bond minimums, funds that oil and gas companies set aside to clean up abandoned or malfunctioning wells, would drop to $10,000 for an individual lease and $25,000 for a collection of statewide leases, respectively—far below typical costs for that work. Under Biden, those minimums were $150,000 and $500,000.
“The bonding program is just a proof of financial ability to fix what you’re about to break,” said Bob LeResche, a Wyoming rancher, during a press conference where ranchers across the West voiced their displeasure with the proposed rule changes. “That’s not an unusual thing. It’s not a burden reserved especially for the oil and gas industry, as BLM seems to think.”
Bonding levels under Biden were “arbitrary and capricious,” said Aaron Johnson, vice president of public and legislative affairs for the Western Energy Alliance, a fossil fuel trade group, in an email to Inside Climate News. Federal agencies pursue an orphaned well’s previous owner if the current one is unresponsive regarding cleanup, Johnson said, insulating the public from automatically paying to fix an orphaned well.
“Very often oil and gas wells are sold through their lifecycle, and selling an asset does not eliminate the potential of future liability,” Johnson said.
But higher bonding minimums help prevent a well from being shuffled from a bigger driller to a less capable one, said Rachael Hamby, policy director for the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation nonprofit. “It’s supposed to weed out financially insolvent operators so that they can’t take on responsibilities that they aren’t going to be able to handle.”
Public comments on the rollback of the oil and gas leasing rules were overwhelmingly negative, according to an analysis by the Center for Western Priorities. Over 99 percent of commenters opposed the changes, with most objecting to the new bonding minimums.
Inside Climate News’ Peter Aldhous contributed to this story.
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Jake Bolster reports on Wyoming and the West for Inside Climate News. Previously, he worked as a freelancer, covering climate change, energy, and the environment across the United States. He holds a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University.
