Challenge to approvals of permits to drill and modify for well stimulation treatments, alleging violations of NEPA, ESA, and Coastal Zone Management Act.
This represents BOEM's payment of 1/3 of settlement. A separate entry represents BSEE's payment of 1/3 of settlement. As noted - Judgment Fund paid 1/3 of settlement, related to ESA claim.
The court found that the programmatic environmental assessment failed to take the required "hard look" under NEPA because the it relied on faulty assumptions about the frequency of well stimulation treatments and the mitigating impacts of an EPA clean water act permit, and because it failed to analyze a reasonable range of alternatives. It also found that the agencies' decision not to prepare an EIS was arbitrary and capricious in light of the "largely unexplored" impacts of offshore fracking and because the record demonstrated "substantial questions relating to several significance factors about the effects of well stimulation treatments."