Federal appeals court may halt Shell’s plans to “drill, baby, drill”

Federal appeals court may halt Shell’s plans to “drill, baby, drill”



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A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled Wednesday that when the U.S. government sold leases to Shell back
in 2008—during the final days of the Bush administration—it did a
spectacularly bad job of assessing the amount of oil available in
Alaska’s Chukchi Sea and the potential environmental impact of removing
it.



For $2 billion, the Interior Department sold Shell the rights
to drill for oil over nearly 30 million acres of the sea floor,
estimating that there were 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the
lease areas. Native Alaskan tribes and environmental groups, including
NRDC (which publishes OnEarth), fought the leases on the
grounds that 1 billion barrels was an extreme understatement. The
three-judge panel agreed Wednesday, calling the estimate “arbitrary and capricious”.



The
case now goes back to U.S. District court in Alaska for further review,
which has the potential to seriously jam up Shell’s Chukchi plans for
the foreseeable future. The attorney representing Shell told Reuters:
“It’s unlikely that the government could authorize drilling activities
on leases the court says were improperly awarded.” In other words: Shell
will likely have to take its massive drilling rigs and go home, at
least for another summer.