Biden administration announces it will resume onshore oil and gas lease sales with higher royalty rate
The Department of Interior announced Friday it planned to resume onshore oil and gas lease sales on federal land, with a higher royalty rate for companies to pay to the federal government.
The Bureau of Land Management will issue sale notices on Monday for upcoming oil and gas projects.The Biden administration had previously planned to hold the lease sale, but paused it after a judge blocked the administration from using a metric to quantify the economic harm caused by the climate crisis, such as sea level rise, more destructive hurricanes, extreme wildfire seasons and flooding. The Biden administration appealed that ruling and argued it necessitated a pause on all of the many projects in which the government used that particular analysis.
