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Senator presses agency over delay in releasing updated environmental analysis on Wyoming oil and gas leases
Summary
An unnamed senator told a Senate Committee the Bureau of Land Management’s Wyoming analysis — completed after a June 2022 settlement covering 2015–2020 leases — has not been publicly released; an agency official said they had no date for release while citing a need to reconcile court decisions across the West.
An unnamed senator pressed an agency representative at a Senate Committee hearing over why an updated environmental analysis tied to a June 2022 settlement covering oil and gas leases issued in Wyoming from 2015 through 2020 has not been released.
The senator said the Bureau of Land Management’s Wyoming state office told lawmakers that it had finished the updated environmental analysis “last summer,” and asked why the bureau had not published the report. The senator said state permitting offices in Wyoming were refusing to issue drilling permits until the bureau made the updated analysis available.
The dispute centers on a settlement the senator described as requiring the bureau to update environmental reviews for those leases. The agency representative replied that the bureau was "reconciling a different court decisions and opinions throughout our, throughout the West" and wanted to ensure consistency before moving forward. When asked which analysis the senator referred to, the agency official said they did not have a date to provide for release.
The hearing record shows no formal release date or commitment from the agency during this exchange. The senator criticized the administration’s overall approach to energy policy, calling it "a deliberate sabotage of American energy by an administration" and arguing that an emphasis on decarbonization risks U.S. competitiveness. The senator added that other countries, he said, were investing heavily in areas such as artificial intelligence.
The agency official did not provide a schedule for publishing the updated analysis and described ongoing legal and consistency reviews as the reason for the delay. The committee did not record a vote or a formal directive during the exchange.
Next steps were not set during the hearing; the agency’s statement that no release date was available is the most recent procedural development on the record.
