Interior clears way for energy development on land Trump removed from monument, but industry shows little interest

Washington Post map shows current and former monument boundaries and the energy potential in the area.

The Department of the Interior has issued its final plans "to allow mining and energy drilling on nearly a million acres of land in southern Utah that had once been protected as part of a major national monument," reports Coral Davenport of The New York Times.

The plan clears the way for energy companies to lease almost 862,000 acres that had been part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, created by Bill Clinton. President Trump cut the monument’s acreage about in half in December 2017, and "removed about a million acres from another Utah monument, Bears Ears," created by Barack Obama, Davenport notes. "Together, the moves were the largest rollback of public lands protection in United States history."

No developers have moved to lease the land, "although they could have done so at any time in the months following Mr. Trump’s proclamation that he was removing protection from the land, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department said."

That is probably no surprise to Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post, who wrote over a year ago that the land Trump removed from the monument was unlikely to attract much interest from energy developers. "In this fight," she wrote, "ideology has triumphed over economics."