Washington (Platts)--22Sep2010/348 pm EDT/1948 GMT

Thirty-six members of the US Congress from coal mining states are urging Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to defend the agency's coal-leasing program against lawsuits filed recently by environmental groups seeking more stringent reviews of the air quality and climate change impacts from massive surface mines in Wyoming. In a Wednesday letter to the secretary, the lawmakers criticized recent legal actions taken by WildEarth Guardians against the Bureau of Land Management and emphasized the importance of more than 5.8 billion short tons in pending federal coal sales "to the economy and energy security of this nation." "An efficient leasing program is critical to ensuring retention of high-paying jobs and affordable sources of electricity to meet our growing energy needs," the group, led by the three-member Wyoming delegation, said in a letter sent Wednesday. "We believe that the public interest requires a vigorous defense of the Department's federal coal leasing program." The sale of federal coal leases in the state's Powder River Basin, which has gone largely unchallenged for years, began drawing opposition earlier this year from a number of environmental groups, including WildEarth Guardians and the Powder River Basin Resource Council, which filed agency appeals then lawsuit to proposed leasing decisions. In four legal actions, the groups have challenged federal environmental reviews of individual coal tracts and in a fifth challenge, WildEarth Guardians is seeking to overhaul the way the government goes about selling its coal. The Santa Fe, New Mexico-based group said existing environmental review procedures do not adequately consider air quality impacts and the downstream release of greenhouse gases on climate change. The challenge and other delays to the sale of the coal tracts, conducted through a process known as leasing by application, has drawn the ire of Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal and worried the state's mining industry. The leases are the primary source of reserves for all the major producers in the southern PRB, which annually accounts for some 40% of US production. The state, which collected $270 million in severance tax revenue from coal production during the 2009 fiscal year, and major coal companies including Peabody Energy, Cloud Peak Energy and Alpha Natural Resources, have intervened in many of the cases. A group of industry officials met with congressional allies over the summer to warn of the potential impact on business, while Freudenthal flew BLM Administrator Bob Abbey out to Wyoming in August to plead his case. In their letter to Salazar, the lawmakers pointed to multi-year environmental impact statements already conducted for the leases as evidence that adequate review has been conducted. "If this administration continues to shut down domestic energy production like Powder River Basin coal or offshore oil and gas production, America will only be further dependent on unstable foreign countries for our energy supply," Doc Hastings, the top Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee, and one of the lawmakers who signed the letter, said in a statement Tuesday. The letter was also signed by the committee Chairman Nick Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat. In all, 20 House Republicans and eight Democrats signed the letter. Eight Republican senators also signed on. The lawmakers told Salazar that the suits are designed to halt coal leasing in PRB, a notion Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians, disputes. Nichols said that while he would like to see the US move away from coal as its primary source of electricity, he believes critics are mischaracterized the lawsuits as being designed to shut down Wyoming coal mining. He said BLM and Interior have to give more consideration to their "indirect role" in adding to greenhouse gas emissions. "We can't shut down the mines right now but 20, 30 years from now we need to get on a cleaner energy bandwagon," Nichols said. "We need solutions [to the leasing issues] but that doesn't mean we completely ignore the environmental impacts of mining." Interior and BLM official said they had yet to see the letter and had no comment. --Peter Gartrell, peter_gartrell@platts.com Similar stories appear in Coal Outlook. See more information at http://www.platts.com/Products/coaloutlook/