Interior Coal Lease Data Not Available Online

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.

• "U.S. Charging Coal Companies Too Little for Land, Report Says," New York Times, February 7, 2014, by Coral Davenport.
• "Undervalued Coal Leases Seen as Costing Taxpayers," New York Times, June 11, 2013, by John M. Broder.
• "Markey: Report on Public Coal Leasing Shows Taxpayers Losing Money," Release of February 4, 2014, Sen. Ed Markey.
• "Coal Leasing: BLM Could Enhance Appraisal Process, More Explicitly Consider Coal Exports, and Provide More Public Information," Government Accountability Office (GAO-14-140), February 4, 2014.
• "Coal Management Program, U.S. Department of the Interior," Office of Inspector General (Interior Dept.), June 2013, Report No. CR-EV-BLM-0001-2012.
• "New Report Details How Federal Coal Leasing and Exports Undermine Obama’s Climate Plan," Release of July 28, 2014, Greenpeace USA.