(CN) — A federal judge halted development of a sprawling oil and gas project in Wyoming after determining federal regulators may have substantially underestimated the project’s impact on groundwater.
The Bureau of Land Management seemed to miscalculate the storage of local aquifers by a factor of 10,000 while assessing the impact of the Converse County Oil and Gas Project, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in a 17-page decision filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Bad math may have hidden the project’s true impact on the region’s water supply, Chutkan wrote.
The Barack Obama appointee ordered attorneys to file additional briefs to determine if the project should be vacated pending a new environmental impact statement. In the meantime, the judge ordered the Bureau to stop approving new drilling permits.
A spokesman for the bureau said he could not comment on the litigation.
Attempts to reach the Powder River Basin Resource Council and Western Watersheds Project, the environmental organizations that filed the lawsuit, were unsuccessful.
The Converse County Oil and Gas Project would allow for 5,000 new oil and natural gas wells to be built across 1.5 million acres of brushland near the borders of Nebraska and South Dakota. Approved in the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, project would create roughly 8,000 jobs and $28 billion in federal revenue, the bureau estimated.
In 2022, the Powder River Basin Resource Council and Western Watersheds Project sued the land bureau claiming the project would harm wildlife and produce “staggering amounts” of greenhouse gas emissions.
“The Converse County Project is a capstone of the prior administration’s push for ‘energy dominance’ in public lands management, and its efforts to relieve the fossil fuel industry from federal environmental safeguards,” the groups wrote in their complaint.
The conservation groups took particular aim at the Bureau of Land Management’s environmental assessment for the project.
The bureau refused to address air pollution caused by the wells and infrastructure that could harm local residents and reduce visibility at nearby national parks and monuments, including Badlands and Wind Cave, the groups argued. The wells would also operate throughout the year, disturbing the nesting patterns of hawks and falcons.
Hydraulic fracking would use up roughly 108 million barrels of water a year — about equivalent to consumption from all other sources in the county, the plaintiffs say.
The bureau studied the project’s impact on groundwater, but misplaced a decimal in determining the “specific storage” of nearby aquifers, or the capacity of the aquifer to release groundwater.
The Environmental Protection Agency submitted a letter pointing out the number was off “by at least an order of magnitude” but the bureau failed to correct the issue.
The bureau argues the problem was an “errant parenthetical citation,” but Chutkan disagreed.
“As both the EPA and plaintiffs explain, the drastically higher specific storage value used by BLM may have resulted in ‘substantial underestimation’ of groundwater drawdown,” the judge wrote.
Todd Tucci, an attorney for Advocates for the West, a nonprofit environmental law firm based in Boise, Idaho, represented the environmental groups in the lawsuit. He did not respond to a request for comment.