Two U.S. Bureau of Land Management field offices recently released prepared final supplemental environmental impact statements and amended resource management plans pertaining to federally owned coal acres in the Powder River Basin, with options including more limited federal acreage available for coal leasing.
In March 2018, a federal judge ordered the agency's field offices in Miles City, Mont., and Buffalo, Wyo., to conduct environmental analyses and consider alternatives before issuing more coal mining leases. The bureau announced the findings of those analyses Oct. 4.
The Buffalo field office includes about 800,000 acres of surface land and 4.7 million acres of mineral estate in north-central Wyoming, according to an Oct. 4 notice in the Federal Register. The 2015 approved resources management plan, updated with a 2018 coal production baseline, includes nearly 687,000 acres containing 73.66 billion tons of coal reserves for potential coal leasing.
An alternative plan, which applied new coal screens and considered new scientific data, would include more than 455,000 acres for coal leasing containing 52.24 billion tons of federal coal reserves. The BLM is proposing a modification to the alternative that would make more than 495,000 acres of federal coal available for leasing, following input from the public, stakeholders, agencies and "updated best-available information and special expertise provided by cooperating agencies and the public," according to the notice.
The Miles City office oversees about 2.7 million acres of federal surface land and 10.6 million acres of federal mineral estate in eastern Montana, according to the Federal Register. The 2015 resource management plan included an area containing nearly 1.6 million acres for potential coal leasing. The bureau's proposed plan amendment takes the "development of air resources as a multiple use screen," resulting in a coal leasing area containing about 1.2 million acres. Another alternative applied an air resource multiple use screen encompassing greenhouse gas emissions criteria on coal development in existing areas, resulting in an area of more than 158,000 acres acceptable for coal leasing consideration, according to the notice.
The BLM is accepting protests to the final environmental impact statements until Nov. 4.
