A U-S District Court judge in Bismarck has ordered the Bureau of Land Management to resume conducting quarterly oil and gas lease sales in North Dakota.
According to North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley, Judge Daniel Traynor’s order directs the Bureau to comply with federal law and do what Congress commanded the Bureau to do.
Wrigley said the dispute began in 2021 when President Biden issued an Executive Order “pausing” quarterly oil and lease sales required by the Mineral Leasing Act and later gave speeches claiming that there would be “no more drilling.”
Wrigley praised the decision as a “victory for the rule of law,” saying that B-L-M’s cancellations were “illegal,” costing North Dakota more than $100 million in revenue per year and depriving U-S access to oil and gas during times of high inflation and threats to U-S energy security.
Wrigley added that it was “unfortunate that North Dakota had to take B-L-M to court twice to finally get it to do its duty.”
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Statement from Gov. Burgum:
Gov. Doug Burgum today applauded a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Traynor ordering the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to resume quarterly sales of oil and gas leases on public lands in North Dakota.
“It should not take a court order to compel the Biden administration to obey the law, or to have the BLM do what it has been directed by Congress to do, but in this case it did, and we applaud Judge Traynor’s order which requires BLM to resume their lawfully required quarterly oil and gas lease sales,” Burgum said. “From the beginning, North Dakota has opposed President Biden’s illegal ban on federal oil and gas leasing, and we will continue to fight their misguided attacks on U.S. energy that hurt the global environment by pushing energy supply to countries that don’t produce energy as cleanly as the United States and put our nation’s economy and energy security at risk. For global stability, we should be selling U.S. energy to our friends and allies, not forcing them to buy it from our adversaries.”
In his ruling, Traynor found that BLM “very likely violated their mandatory statutory duties to plan and timely complete mandatory analyses of individual parcels in North Dakota” for oil and gas lease sales on federal lands.
“The Federal Defendants effectively conceded as much when they told this Court no ‘determinations of availability’ were made in North Dakota during Q4 2022,” Traynor noted in reference to a sale that was supposed to take place in the fourth quarter of 2022, adding, “The President also proceeded to say the quiet part out loud when he announced to the public there would be ‘no more drilling’ in November 2022.”
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