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Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority v. U.S. Department of the Interior
Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority v. U.S. Department of the Interior ↗
3:24-cv-00051D. Alaska4 entries
Filing Date
Type
Action Taken
Document
Summary
03/25/2025
Decision
Lease cancellation vacated.
The federal district court for the District of Alaska vacated the Biden administration’s September 2023 cancellation of Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas leases. The Biden administration had canceled the leases—which were entered into at the end of the first Trump administration—based on the U.S. Department of the Interior’s conclusion that the leases were “unlawful in the inception” due to legal defects in the environmental review, including failure to adequately quantify downstream greenhouse gas emissions. In its decision vacating the cancellation, the court held that the Interior Department failed to follow the procedure mandated by the implementing regulations of the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act of 1976 for lease cancellations, which require a court order and which the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made applicable to the ANWR Coastal Plain oil and gas program.
01/15/2025
Response
Plaintiff filed response to defendants' status report.
The plaintiff filed a response to the defendants' status report regarding the ANWR oil and gas lease sale for which no bids were received by the deadline of January 6, 2025. The plaintiff contested the Department of the Interior's attribution for the lack of interest to recognition by industry that ANWR is too environmentally sensitive for oil drilling. The plaintiff stated: "DOI is mistaken. No one bid in the second ANWR oil and gas sale because DOI rewrote the operational rules so restrictively that no one could viably bid." The plaintiff further stated that it "stands ready and willing to conduct lawful, environmentally-appropriate oil and gas activities if the Court overturns DOI’s unlawful cancellation of the leases that DOI issued AIDEA in January 2021 in the first lease sale, to fulfill the mandate of the Tax Act."
Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority v. U.S. Department of the Interior ↗
1:23-cv-03126 D.D.C.3 entries
Filing Date
Type
Action Taken
Document
Summary
02/23/2024
Decision
Government’s motion to transfer to the federal district court for the District of Alaska granted.
The federal district court in the District of Columbia granted federal defendants’ motion to transfer to the District of Alaska, where a case in which the same plaintiff had unsuccessfully challenged the Biden administration's 2021 moratorium on Arctic National Wildlife Refuge leasing program activities. The court agreed with the defendants that the District of Alaska was “the superior forum” because it would make “little sense” to adjudicate the matter in the District of Columbia, to which the plaintiff had no connection, and when the lawsuit’s subject matter was in another state where a court already had ruled on a similar dispute involving the same parties.
10/18/2023
Complaint
Complaint filed.
Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) filed a lawsuit in federal district court in the District of Columbia challenging the U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI’s) September 2023 termination of seven oil and gas leases on the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The leases were issued in January 2021; DOI suspended the leases in June 2021. After a court <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/alaska-industrial-development-export-authority-v-biden/">rejected</a> a challenge to the suspension, DOI issued a letter canceling the leases, citing, among other things, DOI’s failure in its environmental review for the 2021 leases to provide quantitative estimates of downstream greenhouse gas emissions from foreign consumption or to explain why it could not provide such estimates and DOI’s failure to consider alternatives that involved fewer than 2,000 acres of surface development. AIDEA asserted that the lease cancellations violated the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Administrative Procedure Act, that DOI failed to provide AIDEA with due process, and that the cancellation violated DOI regulations.