March 31, 2025 — A federal judge on Thursday blocked an oil and gas lease sale in Gulf waters off the coast of Louisiana, finding that a federal agency didn’t adequately take into account how new offshore drilling would impact the highly endangered Rice’s whale.
The ruling from Judge Amit Mehta in the U.S. District court for the District of Columbia will require the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management, which oversees the sale of oil and gas leases in federal waters, to conduct additional environmental reviews before the lease sale proceeds. The current lease sale is not canceled, but will be subject to additional environmental review.
The court also ruled that BOEM did not fully take into account the impact of greenhouse gas emissions that would result from the new oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico, also referred to as the Gulf of America after President Donald Trump moved to rename it via executive order.
“BOEM acted arbitrarily by failing to address the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS’s) determination that the whale’s habitat range extends into the western and central Gulf,” Mehta wrote in his ruling.