U.S. Supreme Court approves oil railroad expansion in Utah despite outcry from environmental groups

Globe and Mail

29-05-2025

The U.S. Supreme Court backed a multibillion-dollar oil railroad expansion in Utah Thursday in a ruling that scales back a key environmental law and could accelerate development projects around the country.
The 8-0 decision comes after an appeal to the high court from backers of the project, which is aimed at quadrupling oil production in the remote area of sandstone and sagebrush.
Environmental groups said the decision would have sweeping impacts on National Environmental Policy Act reviews. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has already said it's speeding up that process after the president in January declared a 'national energy emergency' and vowed to boost U.S. oil and gas development.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh referred to the decision as a 'course correction' in an opinion fully joined by four conservative colleagues.
'Congress did not design NEPA for judges to hamstring new infrastructure and construction projects,' he wrote. The three liberal justices agreed the Utah project should get its approval, but they would have taken a narrower path.
The case centres on the Uinta Basin Railway, a proposed 88-mile (142-kilometer) expansion that would connect the oil-rich region of northeast Utah to the national rail network, allowing oil and gas producers to access larger markets. The state's crude oil production was valued at $4.1 billion in 2024, according to a Utah Geological Survey report, and could increase substantially under the expansion project.
The justices reversed a lower court decision and restored a critical approval from federal regulators on the Surface Transportation Board.
Construction, though, does not appear to be imminent. Project leaders must obtain several permits and secure necessary financing with private-sector partners before they can break ground, said Uinta Basin Railway spokesperson Melissa Cano.
Environmental groups and a Colorado county had argued that regulators must consider a broad range of potential impacts when they consider new development, such as increased wildfire risk, the effect of additional crude oil production from the area and increased refining in Gulf Coast states.
The justices, though, found that regulators were right to consider the direct effects of the project, rather than the wider upstream and downstream impact. Kavanaugh wrote that courts should defer to regulators on 'where to draw the line' on what factors to take into account. 'The goal of the law is to inform agency decision making, not to paralyze it,' he said.
The court's conservative majority court has taken steps to curtail the power of federal regulators in other cases, however, including striking down the decades-old Chevron doctrine that made it easier for the federal government to set a wide range of regulations.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a concurrence that the court could have simply cleared the way for the railway approval by saying that regulators did not need to consider increased fossil fuel production tied to the project.
Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case after facing calls to step aside over ties to Philip Anschutz, a Colorado billionaire whose ownership of oil wells in the area means he could benefit if the project goes through. Gorsuch, as a lawyer in private practice, had represented Anschutz.
The ruling comes after Trump's vow to boost U.S. oil and gas drilling and move away from former President Joe Biden's focus on climate change. The administration announced last month it's speeding up environmental reviews of projects required under the same law at the centre of the Utah case, compressing a process that typically takes a year or more into just weeks.
'The court's decision gives agencies a green light to ignore the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their decisions and avoid confronting them,' said Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president of programs at Earthjustice.
Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said opponents would continue to fight the Utah project. 'This disastrous decision to undermine our nation's bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify, and people will be less healthy,' she said.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said the ruling affirms a 'balanced approach' to environmental oversight. He praised the railroad expansion as a critical infrastructure project that will help 'restore America's energy independence' and bolster the state's rural economy.
James Coleman, a professor at University of Minnesota Law School, said the ruling is an 'important corrective' that would have judges deferring to federal regulators rather than requiring them to consider upstream and downstream effects of energy transportation projects.
The project's public partner also applauded the ruling. 'It represents a turning point for rural Utah – bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability,' said Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition.