Interior Coal Lease Data Not Available Online

September 11, 2014

You — as an owner (one of 314 million) of the coal reserves on federal land — might want to know whether the Bureau of Land Management is getting a fair return for your property when it is sold to a coal company. Good luck with that.

Certainly, there is a database of federal coal lease activity. It's just that you would have a really hard time getting to it. Certainly, there are serious questions about whether the resource-owning public is getting enough revenue from its coal — much less the impact of all that coal on climate change.

Interior coal was the "elephant in the room" when Interior Secretary Sally Jewell addressed a plenary session of the Society of Environmental Journalists' annual conference in New Orleans September 5, 2014. A Greenpeace protester wearing an elephant costume upstaged Jewell briefly in an effort to raise the issue. Jewell did not address coal leasing. Interior leased about 480,000 acres of land for coal extraction in 2012.

Several investigations — most recently one by Senate Energy Committee Democrats — found that Interior may be failing to get what the coal is worth. Interior's own Inspector General reached similar findings in June 2013. A Government Accountability Office report released in February 2014 found the same thing — and complained that "BLM generally provides limited information on federal coal lease sales to the public because of the sensitive and proprietary nature of some of this information."

You heard that right: you own the coal, but the companies claim to own the information about what is being done with your coal.

A description of the well-protected Interior Coal Lease Data System can be found here.

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