VICTORY! Keeping 48 Billion Tons of Powder River Basin Coal in the Ground

WELC is working with our partners toward the goal of keeping Powder River Basin coal in the ground. As we hurdle toward the point of no return on climate, the federal Bureau of Land Management attempted to make available billions of tons of fossil fuels on our public lands. The BLM’s 2015 resource management plans and environmental impact statements in Wyoming and Montana exemplified this disconnect to the extreme.

The BLM’s Miles City (Montana) and Buffalo (Wyoming) RMPs kept open more than 2 million acres for coal leasing, on which the agency projected about 6 billion tons of coal would be developed in the next 20 years. The plans also authorized millions of acres for oil and gas leasing, with BLM projecting that 18,000 wells will be drilled over the 20-year planning horizons.

We asked BLM to consider the indirect impacts of combustion emissions from both coal and oil and gas in the Buffalo and Miles City RMPs. In both RMPs, BLM acknowledged that fossil fuels would be combusted, but failed to address the impacts to air and water from this combustion.

We successfully argued in court for a more detailed analysis of alternatives to this billion-ton coal portfolio and a deeper study of the environmental impact the projects would have on the Powder River Basin and the climate, keeping that coal in the ground for now. As a result of our action, the BLM deferred its planned summer oil and gas lease sale representing 100,000 acres of public land and mineral rights. 

After our court victory, BLM put forth a revised plan that is out of line with the court order in our 2018 victory. We again defeated the agency in 2022. requiring BLM to redo its plan again, this time with a no-leasing alternative by court order. In this plan, the high extraction alternative would see 48 billion tons of coal mined in the Powder River Basin.

In a forward-thinking move and a huge victory for our advocacy and the climate, the Biden administration in 2024 selected the plan’s no-leasing alternative, keeping more than 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide and chemicals emitted in the process of coal combustion out of the atmosphere.

This case, while monumentally positive for the climate, highlights how slow change comes to agencies. The science now shows not only that coal mining in the Powder River Basin is extremely destructive to the environment, climate, and human health, but also that it causes much more economic harm than good.