US court suspends lease for Cook Inlet in Alaska pending final environmental impact assessment

JUNEAU, Alaska – A federal judge has suspended the lease for a 2022 oil and gas sale in Alaska’s Cook Inlet basin after finding problems with the environmental review on which the lease was based.

In a ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason found that the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management failed in its analysis of the impacts of ship noise on the beluga whales in Cook Inlet, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act. She also found it problematic that the agency lumped the beluga whales and other marine mammals together when considering cumulative impacts. She found that the beluga whales in Cook Inlet “have been affected differently by past actions than other marine mammals in Cook Inlet” and that the agency should have considered the cumulative impacts of leasing activities on them separately.

Gleason, who lives in Alaska, declined to set aside the lease sale as requested by the conservation groups that sued to stop the sale. Instead, she suspended the lease granted as part of the sale until a supplemental environmental review is completed that addresses the problems she identified.

The Interior Department had no comment, said Giovanni Rocco, a spokesman for the agency; the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is under the Interior Department. An email seeking comment was sent to a spokesman for Hilcorp Alaska LLC, which submitted the sole bid for the 2022 lease sale. Hilcorp is the largest natural gas producer in Cook Inlet.

The conservation groups had already indicated days before the auction that they wanted to sue over the lease auction.

Carole Holley, an Earthjustice attorney involved in the litigation, called Tuesday’s ruling a victory for Alaskan communities, white whales and “future generations who will face a warmer planet.”

“We are pleased that this destructive lease sale has been brought back under review and will continue to advocate for a move away from fossil fuels and toward a better and healthier energy future,” Holley said in a statement.

In May 2022, the Interior Department said it would not move forward with the proposed Cook Inlet sale because there was “no industry interest in leases in the area,” according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. But Congress later passed legislation calling for a lease sale in Cook Inlet by the end of 2022 and two lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico in 2023. These provisions were part of a comprehensive package that also included major investments in combating climate change.

Cook Inlet is Alaska’s oldest oil and gas basin, where production peaked in the 1970s, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Alaska’s most populous region relies on natural gas from Cook Inlet, and the state has also seen little interest in its recent Cook Inlet lease sales.