Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance v. U.S. Department of the Interior

On May 19, 2025, the federal district court for the District of Utah reopened Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance’s case challenging four oil and gas leasing decisions made by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2018 and 2019 for federally owned land in eastern Utah. The leasing decisions resulted in issuance of 145 oil and gas leases. Since 2019, BLM suspended certain of the leases to conduct still-pending additional analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of the climate change impacts of oil and gas leases, but many of the leases at issue in this lawsuit, which was filed in 2023, were not currently suspended. On January 30, 2025, BLM approved eight applications for permits to drill (APDs) by an intervenor defendant pursuant to the leases. The court dismissed the lawsuit as unripe on February 4. In its May 19 decision, the court acknowledged that the February 4 decision “relied heavily on two factual determinations which it now concedes are inaccurate”: (1) that all of the leases were suspended, and (2) that there were no approved APDs on any of the leases at issue. The court concluded that upon re-examination of these facts, BLM’s leasing decisions were final given that lessees “can take concrete steps to develop and disturb their leased land,” even if the decisions might change when the supplemental NEPA analysis is concluded. The court therefore granted SUWA’s motion to reconsider and denied intervenor defendants’ motions to dismiss.

The federal district court for the District of Utah dismissed as unripe a lawsuit filed by Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) challenging four oil and gas leasing decisions covering 145 leases in Utah’s Book Cliffs and Uinta Basin regions. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) made the leasing decisions from 2018 to 2019; leases issued pursuant to all four decisions were currently suspended. Although the court found that SUWA had standing to challenge the leasing decisions based on allegations of injury to a member, the court determined that BLM’s leasing decisions were not final since the leases had been suspended.

The federal district court for the District of Utah allowed Anschutz Exploration Corporation (Anschutz) and the State of Utah to intervene to defend the issuance of 145 oil and gas leases covering public lands in Utah. Anschutz holds 54 of the leases and Utah asserted that it had regulatory and economic interests in the challenged leases. The court found that the motions to intervene were timely, that both Anschutz and Utah asserted interests sufficient to support intervention of right, that those interests could be impaired by the case, and that the federal defendants could not adequately represent the interests of Anschutz and Utah.