The controversial Uinta Basin Railway was greenlighted by the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday.
The high court overturned a federal appeals court decision that rejected the Surface Transportation’s Board’s approval of the proposed railroad connecting Utah’s rural Uinta Basin oilfields with the national rail network, clearing the tracks for more crude tankers rolling through Colorado along the Colorado River.
The country’s highest court said Thursday the Surface Transportation Board’s 2021 approval of the controversial Uinta Basin Railway — following several years of review and a 3,600-page environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA — adequately analyzed the impact of the railroad and the agency did not need to study potential impacts from increased drilling or refining of Uinta Basin crude.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., in 2023 rejected the board’s approval of the 88-mile railroad, arguing the transportation board should have more closely reviewed impacts beyond the railroad that seven rural Utah counties hoped would spark economic growth with increased production.
The appeals court “did not afford the board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases,” reads the 36-page Supreme Court decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “The D.C. Circuit ordered the board to address the environmental effects of projects separate in time or place from the construction and operation of the railroad line. But NEPA requires agencies to focus on the environmental effects of the project at issue.”
The decision, which aligned with the idea that NEPA lawsuits have forced agencies to push beyond the act’s scope, found that the transportation board “did not need to address the environmental effects of upstream oil drilling or downstream oil refining. Rather, it needed to address only the effects of the 88-mile railroad line. And the board’s EIS did so.”
A coalition of environmental groups and communities, including Eagle County, in December argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that the transportation board should have weighed downstream impacts of the new railroad. The coalition, which sued in 2022 to overturn the transportation’s approval, argued that 2-mile-long trains carrying the Uinta Basin’s viscous, waxy crude along the Colorado River en route to Gulf Coast refineries posed a risk to the river and communities along the tracks if tankers derailed. They also argued that refining an additional 5 billion gallons of crude a year could accelerate a warming climate.
The argument before the Supreme Court in December revolved around the scope of the 55-year-old National Environmental Policy Act. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition backing the Unite Basin Railway argued the 3,600-page, several-year review was sufficient and the act did not require agencies to study unknown but possible impacts from projects.
The railroad supporters argued that NEPA is a procedural regulation that has been turned into “a substantial roadblock” by groups that sue to overturn NEPA-reviewed decisions. The high court agreed.
“Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock,” reads Kavanaugh’s ruling. “The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it.”
The ruling, which noted some courts assuming “an aggressive role in policing agency compliance with NEPA,” said “the central principle of judicial review in NEPA cases is deference” to the reviewing agency.
“Under NEPA, an agency’s only obligation is to prepare an adequate report,” reads the opinion.
Kavanaugh wrote that some courts have strayed and not applied the required deference under NEPA.
“Those decisions have instead engaged in overly intrusive (and unpredictable) review in NEPA cases,” he wrote. “Those rulings have slowed down or blocked many projects and, in turn, caused litigation-averse agencies to take more time and to prepare even longer EISs for future projects.”
Utah’s oil fields produced 65.1 million barrels of crude in 2024, a 13% annual increase and a record high. That’s a 110% rebound from 2020, when Utah oil production cratered, dropping to 31 million barrels, according to a May 2 report from the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute and the Utah Geological Survey.
With the growth in production, the state exported a record 33 million barrels of crude, most of it from the Uinta Basin and shipped by truck to Price, Utah, and then by train to the Gulf Coast. The Uinta Basin Railway would eliminate the need for trucks and exponentially increase crude production in the basin, which spans thousands of square miles in rural Utah.
In September 2024, the state hit a production record of 191,000 barrels a day. Most of Utah’s crude comes from the Uinta Basin, where production averaged about 174,000 barrels a day in the summer and fall of 2024.
The report from Utah’s energy analysts noted that moving Uinta Basin crude via truck was a challenge, especially if the basin ever tipped past 200,000 barrels a day.
“Transportation constraints could also ease if the proposed Uinta Basin railway moves forward,” reads the report.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion that took a different path to agree with the majority ruling to overturn the appeals court’s rejection of the transportation board’s approval of the railroad. The three justices argued that agencies working through a NEPA review should weigh impacts beyond projects and ultimately found the transportation board had done just that. They ruled that the transportation board did not have the authority to consider possible environmental effects of oil shipped from the Uinta Basin.
“Under NEPA, agencies must consider the environmental impacts for which their decisions would be responsible,” reads the concurring opinion written by Sotomayor. “Here, the board correctly determined it would not be responsible for the consequences of oil production upstream or downstream from the railway because it could not lawfully consider those consequences as part of the approval process.”
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Thursday called the railway “a risky scheme” that poses “major risks to Colorado’s Western Slope communities.”
“The proposed project – now allowed by the court’s ruling – lets an out-of-state company build a new 88-mile railway to ship thousands of oil barrels along the river daily,” reads a statement from Weiser. “The lower federal court correctly found that the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires such projects to be fully informed of all potential environmental hazards before shovels go into the ground. The Surface Transportation Board must still decide other environmental issues that weren’t part of this case. We’ll remain vigilant and deploy every tool available under the law to protect Colorado’s land, air, and water and hold federal agencies accountable to their oversight obligations.”
This is a developing story that will be updated.
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