Court Finds Massive Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Lease Sale Illegal

After years of organizing, advocacy, and legal action, the D.C District Court handed down another huge win for frontline Gulf communities, our climate, and endangered species like the Rice’s whales — declaring the Biden Administration’s massive 2023 Gulf of Mexico oil and gas lease sale illegal. This win is even more meaningful considering the Trump Administration’s recent attacks on the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”), our nation’s premier bedrock environmental law.   

The Court ruled that the Interior Department violated NEPA in two key respects. First, it relied on a misleading analysis of the project’s climate impact to implausibly conclude that the sale would result in only minor greenhouse gas emissions. Second, it failed to account for the lease sale’s impact on the critically endangered Rice’s whale.  

The Department of the Interior had previously canceled the lease sale, originally scheduled for 2022. However, former Senator Manchin inserted a provision into the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that forced Interior to move forward the sale, along with two similarly canceled sales: Lease Sale 258 in Cook Inlet, Alaska and Lease Sale 261 in the Gulf of Mexico.  

This win is the second installation of a comprehensive legal campaign building on our victory over Lease Sale 257. Our lawsuit challenging LS257 was initially filed by Earthjustice on behalf of Friends of the Earth, Healthy Gulf, Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity to hold BOEM accountable for fully assessing oil and gas harms in the Gulf. That lawsuit argued that the environmental analysis that the Biden administration relied on to hold the sale was fatally flawed, being based on previously debunked environmental analysis.    

Our legal challenge against LS259 — which offered up all 73.3 million acres (about the area of Arizona) of unleased areas in the Western and Central Gulf of Mexico, potentially resulting in over 1 billion barrels of oil and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas being extracted over the next 50 years — was filed on March 6, 2023. The complaint noted that in approving this lease sale, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) did not consider the health hazards it would cause for Gulf communities residing in proximity to oil refineries and other polluting infrastructure connected with offshore drilling, as well as the threats posed to endangered marine life by oil spills. The Gulf ecosystem is home to five of the world’s seven species of sea turtles and the critically endangered Gulf of Mexico Rice’s whale, of which there are only about 51 remaining.  

Since the sale has already occurred, the Court has ordered additional briefing on what remedy is adequate in this situation. Once this case is done, Friends of the Earths’ active litigation over LS261 — planned for late 2025 — will continue. This sale aims to open more than 67 million acres in the Gulf Coast to new oil and gas leasing.  

This victory means that BOEM’s recent lackluster environmental assessment is unlawful, and we are optimistic that we can achieve future analysis that fully reviews and accounts for the range of impacts of these destructive lease sales and all future sales. We are sending a message to the Trump administration and its oil industry allies that we will not stop fighting inside and outside the courtroom for the people, ecosystem, and wildlife of the Gulf, and attempts to give unlawful handouts to the oil industry will only continue to lose.