This August, the United States Montana District Court reinstated a pause on the leasing of federal lands for coal production. The initial freeze was initiated more than 6 years ago, in January 2016, when the Department of the Interior (DOI) paused new federal coal lease sales while undertaking a comprehensive review of the federal coal program. In January 2017, the DOI published a scoping report as the first stage in their multi-year review. However, this process was abandoned in March 2017 when an Executive Order directed the Secretary of the Interior to “amend or withdraw” the coal moratorium. The moratorium was repealed, the review was cancelled, and the DOI was instructed to expedite new mineral lease applications.  

Taxpayers for Common Sense is pleased the leasing pause is back in place while the coal program undergoes review. TCS has been sounding the alarm about the faulty federal coal program for years, calling for better transparency, fair market value, and increased royalties. In August 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched a new review of the federal coal leasing program’s effects on climate change but did not reinstate the coal moratorium. With this recent court decision, the coal moratorium is back in place and the DOI must conduct a review before restarting its leasing program. 

The DOI is responsible for overseeing the leasing of the federal coal mineral estate over approximately 570 million acres of federal land. Over 3.5 billion tons of coal were produced on federal lands in the past decade, FY 2012-2021. As of FY 2021, there were 284 active federal coal leases covering over 433,000 acres of federal land. Yet the federal coal program has not undergone a comprehensive review since the 1980s. There have been longstanding concerns about the federal coal program -including its ability to attain fair market value for coal development, the reclamation liability from abandoned mining sites, and a leasing process that stymies competition- for decades. Many of these concerns were highlighted in the DOI’s 2017 scoping report, but little progress has been made. Federal lands and the resources contained in them belong to the American public. Systematic issues with coal leasing, royalty rates, royalty relief, coal valuation, and bonding requirements have prevented taxpayers from getting a fair return from federal coal resources. Undertaking a comprehensive review of the federal coal program for the first time since the 1980s is a positive step toward understanding and addressing these issues.