A proposed oil shale mine and ore-processing project in the Uinta Basin is under legal fire from several environmental groups that are seeking to invalidate a recent Bureau of Land Management decision to let the developer cut a 14-mile utility corridor across public land.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Salt Lake City’s U.S. District Court, the groups say the BLM’s environmental review should have considered the impacts to air, water, wildlife and climate from the massive strip mine proposed on private land by Enefit American Oil.
The BLM had declined to conduct the wider analysis, opting instead to look only at the direct impacts associated with the construction of pipelines, roads and transmission lines to the project, which is angling to be the first oil shale mine in North America to produce commercial quantities of crude oil...