Trump Revives Gas Leases Expected to Provoke ‘Immense Conflict’

The largest federal oil and gas lease sales in years are reopening decades-old environmental fights and starting new ones, especially in Utah and Colorado, where the Trump administration is holding large drilling rights auctions this year.

The Bureau of Land Management’s lease sales in Colorado target a long-fought-over plateau that towers over the Colorado River, and a planned Utah auction revives a fight over oil and gas parcels near Canyonlands National Park, conservation groups say.

The sales are part of the Trump administration’s efforts to maximize fossil fuel production and carry out the 2025 tax and spending law’s requirement to hold quarterly oil and gas lease sales on federal lands.

The battle over the 73,000-acre Roan Plateau, a biologically diverse but natural gas-rich woodland northeast of Grand Junction, Colo., was thought to have been settled more than a decade ago when the BLM put most of it off limits to drillers after years of public outcry and litigation.

The Trump administration’s oil and gas agenda threatens to push natural gas development onto the Roan as the BLM is on track to auction drilling rights to 581 square miles of public lands—equivalent to nearly four times the area of Denver—by the end of the year. In Utah, a BLM lease sale scheduled June 24 will auction drilling rights to land near Arches National Park, and another scheduled for December targets land near Canyonlands National Park.

The oil and gas leasing frenzy in northwest Colorado is “reopening old conflicts of the past that had been put to rest, and we’re sure there will be an immense amount of conflict once again,” said Juli Slivka, senior director for policy and programs for the Wilderness Workshop, a western Colorado environmental group.

The BLM’s June 16 lease sale in Colorado was the country’s largest by acreage since 2020, auctioning drilling rights to more than 155,000 acres of public land across northern Colorado, including parcels near Dinosaur National Monument in the state’s northwestern corner. About 134,000 acres were sold in the auction.

Another large lease sale targeting 120,000 acres is scheduled in December, including parcels on the Roan Plateau. A public comment period on the sale is open through July 9.

Though none of the parcels are on Dinosaur’s borders, conservation groups say the potential drilling is far too close.

More than 100,000 acres have been nominated for leasing near Dinosaur National Monument, threatening the park’s wildlife, clean air, water, and visitor experience, said Tracy Coppola, Colorado senior program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association.

“A push for rushed and reckless energy development shouldn’t cost us the national parks and monuments we’ve promised to future generations,” she said.

‘A Settled Matter’

The Roan Plateau, surrounded by oil and gas activity in western Colorado’s natural gas-rich Piceance Basin, is in an area once part of a naval reserve for oil shale mining, but most of its top remains undeveloped. Conservation groups’ years-long legal fight to block drilling on the Roan resulted in a 2014 settlement agreement between the groups and the BLM to cancel oil and gas leases there. The BLM amended a land management plan for the plateau that left much of it off limits to drilling.

Advocates for the Roan thought that battle was history until June 9, when the BLM announced plans to include a slice of the Roan in the December lease sale. The parcels are the last ones atop the Roan that remained unprotected under the settlement agreement but conservationists thought they wouldn’t be leased because previous leaseholders relinquished them. Parcels near the Roan were also auctioned on June 16, but they were outside the protected area.

Western Colorado conservationists fought for more than a decade to protect the Roan from drillers to protect wildlife and watersheds, Slivka said.

“The Roan Plateau is a settled matter,” Jim Ramey, Colorado state director for the Wilderness Society, said in a statement. “Reopening it to drilling during an already unprecedented leasing frenzy risks destroying the Roan Plateau for generations to come.”

But the Piceance Basin is one of the largest natural gas reserves in the US, and producing more gas there is essential to Colorado’s prosperity, said Lynn Granger, president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.

Elevation Resources LLC, a brokerage company, nominated the Roan parcels to be included in the December lease sale on behalf of a client, managing partner Amanda Bidgood said.

Leasing on the Roan complies with all public lands management plans for the area, and the BLM is committed to “responsible development of domestic energy resources while adhering to applicable land use plans and legal requirements,” the BLM said in an unsigned email.

Though the BLM’s leasing of the Roan parcels complies with the settlement agreement, “there’s always opportunity for litigation,” Slivka said.

Drilling Near Arches

In Utah, upcoming lease sales would open land near Arches and Canyonlands national parks to oil and gas drilling.

The June 24 sale would lease parcels in a rugged tributary to the Green River, where development would “destroy wildlife habitat, threaten the region’s remote and scenic character, and impact lands proposed for wilderness designation,” Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) spokesman Grant Stevens said.

The National Park Service in comments to the BLM about the lease sale urged the bureau to consider how drilling on the leases could be seen by visitors to Arches National Park. But the bureau said those impacts would be temporary, and drilling rigs would only be “marginally noticeable.”

SUWA successfully fought for 20 years to keep some of the parcels in the December auction out of BLM lease sales, “but now here we go again in Trump 2.0,” SUWA staff attorney Landon Newell said.

“These are not oil and gas areas and are pure speculation, but the proposal will open the door to development in some of the most scenic and wild places in southeastern Utah,” he said.