Court dismisses Chukchi lease sale appeal

Given that no further exploration is planned in leases sold in the Department of the Interior’s 2008 Chukchi Sea lease sale, the federal District Court in Alaska has finally dismissed a long-standing appeal against the validity of the environmental impact statement for the sale. With the various companies that purchased leases in the sale having already relinquished their leases, only one Shell lease remains in the Chukchi outer continental shelf. Shell is retaining that lease in order to preserve the confidentiality of data from a well that it drilled in the lease and has no plans for further exploration in the region.

In a court order issued on July 19 Judge Ralph Beistline said that, given the changed circumstances surrounding the Chukchi Sea leases, he was dismissing the lease sale case “without prejudice to renewal by the plaintiffs should circumstances change in the future.”

The Native Village of Point Hope and 12 environmental organizations launched the appeal just prior to the lease sale in 2008, claiming that there were deficiencies in the EIS for the sale. With subsequent court rulings requiring improvements to the EIS before exploration activities could be approved, the appeal became one of a number of factors delaying Shell’s efforts to drill in the Chukchi - as a consequence of the rulings, Interior issued new versions of the EIS and re-authorized the lease sale in February 2012 and March 2015. The last rework of the EIS resulted from an April 2014 9th Circuit appeals court decision upholding a complaint against the first EIS rework and remanding the case to the District Court.

The appellees challenged the March 2015 decision by Interior, but the various parties in the appeal have agreed that at this stage there is no purpose to continuing that challenge. Three parties in the case - the Native Village of Point Hope, the City of Point Hope and the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope - had already withdrawn from the case in 2015.

- ALAN BAILEY