Trump Energy Agenda Hinges On Court Decisions

President Donald Trump’s push to open more federal lands to oil and gas development, and roll back environmental regulations this year, will likely depend on how well the administration fares in court, observes Argus Media. The administration aims to begin oil leasing in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), open areas for drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, and hold the first lease sale in Arctic waters since 2008. It is also trying to relax regulations for offshore drilling safety, methane emissions, and fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks.

But environmentalists and a coalition of states plan to fight those initiatives by filing lawsuits at each step of the process. Critics of the administration’s energy policies will seek to replicate recent court victories, such as rulings that stopped work on the $8-billion Keystone XL oil pipeline and the $7-billion Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline, in part because of purported insufficient environmental reviews.

The administration is further along with making regulatory changes. It is on track to partially roll back offshore safety rules adopted after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. By spring the administration wants to complete plans to freeze fuel-economy standards after 2020 and cut the frequency of meth- ane leak testing at newly built oil and gas facilities.

California attorney general Xavier Becerra, alongside other state officials and environmentalists, have fought those changes. They say the regulatory rollbacks are based on incomplete environmental reviews, arbitrary justification and, in some cases, information that has not been made public.

The rollback of methane testing requirements, for instance, is based “entirely without support on the existence of uncertainties and concerns regarding the 2016 standard,” Becerra wrote Dec. 17, 2018 in comments submitted alongside a dozen other states. A similar state coalition last year prevailed in a lawsuit against an effort to delay the same methane regulations.

Argus maintains it will take the Trump administration until the second half of 2019 to complete ambitious plans to open more federal areas to drilling. The administration only recently issued draft reviews for leasing in ANWR and has yet to do so for a plan for more leasing in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. It is facing months of additional work before it can open offshore waters, including in the arctic waters of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, to leasing.

At the same time, environmentalists could face a higher bar fighting development in ANWR because leasing was required by lawmakers in 2017 through a sweeping tax cut bill. But environmentalists have raised complaints the administration’s existing leasing plans are incompatible with legal requirements to protect endangered species and marine mammals.

Further, the government shutdown that began Dec. 22, 2018 is likely to delay the administration’s time-lines for regulatory revisions and expanded oil and gas leasing.

(SOURCE: The

, January 28, 2019)