A federal judge in Anchorage has enjoined the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from carrying out a lease sale in the northeastern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA) that was scheduled to take place Wednesday, despite the agency’s offer to forego lease sales in the environmentally sensitive Teshekpuk Lake area of the reserve.

“The secretary of the Interior is enjoined from taking any further action with respect to the Northeast Planning Area…pending further order of the court,” said U.S. District Judge James K. Singleton Monday in a 30-page decision. He ordered Interior’s July decision with respect to the Alaska sale to be “vacated and remanded” to the agency for further consideration.

Singleton upheld his earlier decision in which he temporarily halted the lease sale on the grounds that the BLM’s environmental review of the NPRA lease sale had failed to “adequately address the cumulative effects” of oil and gas drilling near Teshekpuk Lake in Alaska’s North Slope region. The sale would have been the fourth lease sale in the NPRA since 1999.

In Monday’s decision, Singleton said Interior violated the National Environmental Policy Act and abused its discretion by “having failed to fully consider the cumulative effects” of proposed oil and gas development in the Northeast reserve area with the activity in the Northwest Planning Area of the reserve in its environmental review.

In court papers filed last Thursday, BLM attorneys asked Singleton to “do no more than enjoin lease sales” in the area north and east of Teshekpuk Lake, while allowing the rest of the lease sale to take place.

Several environmental groups, including the National Audubon Society of Alaska and the Wilderness League, filed the lawsuit challenging Interior’s decision to allow the lease sale in the 23 million acre reserve. Environmentalists specifically opposed leasing in the previously closed Teshekpuk Lake area.

The proposed sale has come under fire from lawmakers on Capitol Hill as well. In August, 66 House lawmakers urged Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to table plans for the oil and gas lease sale in the NPRA. “Industry already has access to 87% of the [northeast] area of the reserve, and providing them access to the remainder jeopardizes caribou and waterfowl populations and subsistence resources in one of the most important wetland complexes in the Arctic,” the coalition of lawmakers said.

A group of 19 Senate Democrats led by Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico echoed those concerns, and asked Kempthorne to take a closer look at the issues surrounding the sale.

In its initial announcement, the BLM proposed to offer 696 tracts on more than eight million acres in the northeast and northwest planning areas of the NPRA. The sale was to include the reoffering of leases on 183,200 acres that have been relinquished since the 2002 lease sale, as well as and about 373,000 acres north of Teshekpuk Lake.

If the sale had gone through, it would have made a total of 4.39 million acres in the 4.6-million-acre northeastern part of the reserve available for oil and natural gas development.

Interior estimates that the federal lands in the NPRA contain between 5.9 billion and 13.2 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil resources and 39 to 83 Tcf of natural gas. The department believes that the northeast corner of the NPRA contains enough oil and gas resources to help stem the production decline from the maturing fields in the North Slope.

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