Photo credit: Serrgey75 / Shutterstock
When the Bureau of Land Management finalized its repeal of the Public Lands Rule earlier this year, the largely outraged public response focused on both the blow to wildlife habitat preservation, and the benefits for oil and gas leasing.
But the rule, established in 2024, was also poised to reshape how energy infrastructure developers — including of transmission, solar, and geothermal projects — navigate the federal permitting bottleneck, via the creation of a new tool: mitigation leases.
That mechanism would have allowed developers to offset the impact of a project by supporting restoration or mitigation efforts elsewhere on BLM property, which spans 245 million acres of land and 700 million acres of subsurface. A solar developer whose project would disturb wildlife on one parcel, for example, could apply for a mitigation lease to restore habitat on another BLM parcel to satisfy the conditions of their permit.
Now, however, developers won’t have that option. In effect, BLM just repealed a pathway that would have made it easier to build — right at a moment when the grid needs all the new capacity it can get.
