The controversial Uinta Basin Railway won a rare victory in a U.S. Supreme Court unanimous decision published Thursday.

The high court overturned a federal appeals court decision that rejected the Surface Transportation’s Board’s approval of the proposed railroad connecting Utah’s rural Uinta Basin oilfields with the national rail network, clearing the tracks for more crude tankers rolling through Colorado along the Colorado River.

The country’s highest court said Thursday the Surface Transportation Board’s 2021 approval of the controversial Uinta Basin Railway — following several years of review and a 3,600-page environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA — adequately analyzed the impact of the railroad and the agency did not need to study potential impacts from increased drilling or refining of Uinta Basin crude.

Environmental groups quickly lamented the 8-0 decision, saying it severely limits the scope of NEPA at a time when the Trump administration has said it will speed up reviews after the president vowed to boost U.S. oil and gas development on public lands.

Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case in December, citing the court’s new code of conduct. Gorsuch had faced pressure by 13 members of Congress to abstain from hearing the case because of his prior work for Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, whose Anschutz Energy Company wrote a brief in the Uinta Basin Railway case asking the court to narrow the scope of NEPA.

Gorsuch was appointed to the high court from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver in 2017.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., in 2023 rejected the Surface Transportation Board’s approval of the 88-mile railroad, arguing the transportation board should have more closely reviewed impacts beyond the railroad that seven rural Utah counties hoped would spark economic growth with increased production.

The appeals court “did not afford the board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases,” reads the 36-page Supreme Court decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “The D.C. Circuit ordered the board to address the environmental effects of projects separate in time or place from the construction and operation of the railroad line. But NEPA requires agencies to focus on the environmental effects of the project at issue.”

The decision, which aligned with the idea that NEPA lawsuits have forced agencies to push beyond the act’s scope, found that the transportation board “did not need to address the environmental effects of upstream oil drilling or downstream oil refining. Rather, it needed to address only the effects of the 88-mile railroad line. And the board’s EIS did so.”

A coalition of environmental groups and communities, including Eagle County, in December argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that the transportation board should have weighed downstream impacts of the new railroad. The coalition, which sued in 2022 to overturn the transportation’s approval, argued that 2-mile-long trains pulling heated tankers filled with Uinta Basin’s viscous, waxy crude along the Colorado River en route to Gulf Coast refineries posed a risk to the river and communities along the tracks if tankers derailed. They also argued that refining an additional 5 billion gallons of crude a year could accelerate a warming climate.

The argument before the Supreme Court in December revolved around the scope of the 55-year-old National Environmental Policy Act. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition backing the Unite Basin Railway argued the 3,600-page, several-year review was sufficient and the act did not require agencies to study unknown but possible impacts from projects.

The railroad supporters argued that NEPA is a procedural regulation that has been turned into “a substantial roadblock” by groups that sue to overturn NEPA-reviewed decisions. The high court agreed.

“Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock,” reads Kavanaugh’s ruling. “The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it.”

A critical look at NEPA

The ruling, which noted some courts assuming “an aggressive role in policing agency compliance with NEPA,” said “the central principle of judicial review in NEPA cases is deference” to the reviewing agency.

“Under NEPA, an agency’s only obligation is to prepare an adequate report,” reads the opinion.

Kavanaugh wrote that some courts have strayed and not applied the required deference under NEPA.

“Those decisions have instead engaged in overly intrusive (and unpredictable) review in NEPA cases,” he wrote. “Those rulings have slowed down or blocked many projects and, in turn, caused litigation-averse agencies to take more time and to prepare even longer EISs for future projects.”

Utah’s oil fields produced 65.1 million barrels of crude in 2024, a 13% annual increase and a record high. That’s a 110% rebound from 2020, when Utah oil production cratered, dropping to 31 million barrels, according to a May 2 report from the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute and the Utah Geological Survey.

With the growth in production, the state exported a record 33 million barrels of crude, most of it from the Uinta Basin and shipped by truck to Price, Utah, and then by train to the Gulf Coast. The Uinta Basin Railway would eliminate the need for trucks and exponentially increase crude production in the basin, which spans thousands of square miles in rural Utah.

In September 2024, the state hit a production record of 191,000 barrels a day. Most of Utah’s crude comes from the Uinta Basin, where production averaged about 174,000 barrels a day in the summer and fall of 2024.

The report from Utah’s energy analysts noted that moving Uinta Basin crude via truck was a challenge, especially if the basin ever tipped past 200,000 barrels a day.

“Transportation constraints could also ease if the proposed Uinta Basin railway moves forward,” reads the report.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion that took a different path to agree with the majority ruling to overturn the appeals court’s rejection of the transportation board’s approval of the railroad. The three justices argued that agencies working through a NEPA review should weigh impacts beyond projects and ultimately found the transportation board had done just that. They ruled that the transportation board did not have the authority to consider possible environmental effects of oil shipped from the Uinta Basin.

“Under NEPA, agencies must consider the environmental impacts for which their decisions would be responsible,” reads the concurring opinion written by Sotomayor. “Here, the board correctly determined it would not be responsible for the consequences of oil production upstream or downstream from the railway because it could not lawfully consider those consequences as part of the approval process.”

The ruling sends the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for further review.

Environmental groups blasted the decision, calling it “disastrous” and allowing agencies to ignore foreseeable impacts. The Center for Biological Diversity in a statement said the decision limits the power of communities to sue if agencies make mistakes in environmental analyses.

“Today’s decision undermines decades of legal precedent that told federal agencies to look before they leap when approving projects that could harm communities and the environment,” said Earthjustice Senior Vice President of Program Sam Sankar in a statement. “The Trump administration will treat this decision as an invitation to ignore environmental concerns as it tries to promote fossil fuels, kill off renewable energy, and destroy sensible pollution regulations.”

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Thursday called the railway “a risky scheme” that poses “major risks to Colorado’s Western Slope communities.”

“The proposed project – now allowed by the court’s ruling – lets an out-of-state company build a new 88-mile railway to ship thousands of oil barrels along the river daily,” reads a statement from Weiser. “The lower federal court correctly found that the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires such projects to be fully informed of all potential environmental hazards before shovels go into the ground. The Surface Transportation Board must still decide other environmental issues that weren’t part of this case. We’ll remain vigilant and deploy every tool available under the law to protect Colorado’s land, air, and water and hold federal agencies accountable to their oversight obligations.”

The Center for Biodiversity offered bleaker views, saying the case “relieves federal agencies of the obligation to review all foreseeable environmental harms and grants them more leeway to decide what potential environmental harms to analyze, despite what communities may think is important. It tells agencies that they can ignore certain foreseeable impacts just because they are too remote in time or space. And even if the agency makes the wrong call about how to draw that line, the court has now said that the agency gets deference.”

Earthjustice Senior Vice President of Program Sam Sankar said the decision “undermines decades of legal precedent.

“The Trump administration will treat this decision as an invitation to ignore environmental concerns as it tries to promote fossil fuels, kill off renewable energy, and destroy sensible pollution regulations,” Sankar wrote in a news release.

A train transports freight on a common carrier line near Price, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court backed a multibillion-dollar oil railroad expansion in Utah on Thursday, endorsing a limited interpretation of a key environmental law.

The unanimous decision comes after an appeal to the high court from backers of the project, which is aimed at quadrupling oil production in the remote area of sandstone and sagebrush. The backers said limiting the scope of environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act would speed up development.

The case centers on the Uinta Basin Railway, a proposed 88-mile expansion that would connect oil and gas producers to the broader rail network, allowing them to access larger markets.

The justices reversed a lower court decision and restored a critical approval from federal regulators on the Surface Transportation Board. The project could still face additional legal and regulatory hurdles.

Environmental groups and a Colorado county had argued that regulators must consider a broad range of potential impacts when they consider new development.

WASHINGTON — In a win for business interests that chafe at burdensome environmental studies, the Supreme Court on Thursday gave a boost to a planned 88-mile railroad project that would transport crude oil in Utah.

The court ruled in favor of an alliance of local counties that support the project, called the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, concluding that the federal environmental review process did not have to consider potential broader, indirect impacts.

The conservative-majority court was unanimous on the bottom line, although the three liberal justices differed on the reasoning. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case.

The court ruled that consideration of broader downstream impacts of the project were not required under a federal law called the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the court, said some federal judges have incorrectly applied NEPA and allowed it to be used as a broad weapon to challenge major development projects.

“NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents … to try to stop or at least slow down new infrastructure and construction projects,” he wrote.

This has the effect of delaying projects for years, Kavanaugh said.

“Fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line,” he added. “Those that survive often end up costing much more than is anticipated or necessary.”

Environmental groups that had challenged the railroad’s approval decried the ruling, with Sam Sankar, a lawyer at Earthjustice, saying it undermined precedent that said federal agencies should “look before they leap when approving projects that could harm communities and the environment.”

Although the coalition won at the Supreme Court, the project still has to undergo further review by the federal Surface Transportation Board before it can move forward.

The railroad would bring oil from the Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah by connecting the area to the national rail network.

“It represents a turning point for rural Utah — bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability,” said Keith Heaton, the coalition’s director.

The opposition to the project was led by Eagle County, Colorado, which claims it will suffer from downstream effects of the railroad, and several environmental groups.

The county’s lawyers said it would be directly affected by the project, with 9 out of every 10 trains that use the new railroad eventually passing through it on an existing line that runs along the Colorado River.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who also opposes the plan, said in a statement that NEPA should require “projects to be fully informed of all potential environmental hazards before shovels go into the ground.”

The Surface Transportation Board conducted an environmental review and gave the railroad the green light to move forward.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found flaws in the analysis as well as other parts of the approval process, and in a 2023 ruling sent it back to the agency for further review.

The case arose as NEPA has faced criticism for unnecessarily slowing down major projects.

In 2023, then-President Joe Biden signed new legislation that sought to streamline the process. It requires agencies to only consider “reasonably foreseeable” climate impacts and limits reports to 150 pages.

Gorsuch stepped aside after the court had agreed to hear the case, citing the court’s ethics rules. Liberal groups and more than a dozen members of Congress had urged him to recuse himself over his previous links to billionaire Philip Anschutz.

One of Anschutz’s companies, Anschutz Exploration Corp., which drills for oil and gas, filed a brief in the case backing the coalition.

The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously narrowed the scope of government-required environmental reviews for major infrastructure projects, overturning a lower-court block on a rail line in Utah that would carry billions of gallons of oil. The case became a proxy battle over how far federal agencies may go in assessing the environmental impact of highways, pipelines and other projects before deciding whether to approve them.

Business interests cheered the ruling as a necessary check on a process that had become too burdensome, costly and slow, while environmentalists said it would allow agencies to ignore major environmental impacts, including the acceleration of climate change.

An array of challengers spent years battling over the 88-mile stretch of track that would connect the remote Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah to national rail lines, allowing the extraction of more waxy crude oil from one of the nation’s largest oil fields.

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The high court’s ruling returns the case to the lower court for further review under more limited parameters. It remains unclear whether the rail line will ultimately be built.

The decision adds to a string of rulings by the high court that have sharply curtailed environmental regulation. In March, the justices struck down rules regulating the discharge of water pollution. Last term, in a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court overturned a 40-year-old precedent that formed the basis of thousands of environmental regulations, allowing some long-settled rules to be challenged in court. The conservative supermajority also has trimmed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate air pollution, runoff in wetlands and greenhouse gases.

The Utah rail project, which could result in a large increase in greenhouse gas emissions, was approved by the Surface Transportation Board in 2021, with the federal panel saying the benefits of the line would outweigh the negative impacts.

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Five environmental groups and the county that is home to Vail, Colorado, challenged that decision before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The appeals court ruled that the transportation board failed to fully examine the effects of increased drilling in the Uinta Basin and the pollution caused by refining the crude oil on the Gulf Coast, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act.

NEPA, signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, is a cornerstone of environmental law, along with statutes such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Specifically, it requires agencies to consider the environmental implications of their actions.

The Supreme Court’s 8-0 opinion, with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch recusing himself, was written by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and said the lower court ruling amounted to micromanaging agency decisions.

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Reading excerpts from the bench, Kavanaugh said “overly intrusive judicial review” leads to “delay upon delay” and higher costs, noting that the review for the rail line spanned 3,600 pages yet an appeals court still found it deficient.

NEPA, he said, is intended to “simply inform decision-making, not to paralyze it.”

“In sum, when assessing significant environmental effects and feasible alternatives for purposes of NEPA, an agency will invariably make a series of fact-dependent, context-specific, and policy-laden choices about the depth and breadth of its inquiry,” Kavanaugh wrote. “… Courts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.”

The court’s three liberals concurred with the majority but offered alternative reasons. Writing for the group, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said agencies do not have to weigh environmental impacts that fall outside their regulatory authority.

“An agency need not consider every conceivable environmental consequence of a proposed federal action,” Sotomayor wrote. “Rather, agencies need only analyze environmental impacts for which their decision would be (at least in part) ‘responsible.’”

Seven local counties and oil interests say the Utah project would boost the region’s economy, which has been hampered by the lack of transportation options in a mountainous region the size of Maryland. Currently, oil from the basin is trucked out over high mountain roads.

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Groups representing the fossil fuel and logging industries applauded the ruling.

“Congress did not design NEPA for judges to hamstring new infrastructure and construction projects,” Amy Andryszak, president and CEO of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, said in a statement.

Nick Smith, a spokesman for the American Forest Resource Council, said that environmental groups have “weaponized” NEPA when suing to stop logging.

“These lawsuits mistakenly demand exhaustive analysis of every hypothetical alternative and remote impact, stretching NEPA documents into the thousands of pages and dragging reviews on for five or more years — even then facing renewed legal challenges,” Smith said in an email. “We are hopeful this ruling sets a clear precedent for restoring common sense to environmental reviews.”

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Environmentalists and academics differed on the ruling’s significance.

Sam Sankar, a senior vice president with Earthjustice who represented one of the parties opposed to the rail line, said that “the court is giving agencies a green light to put blinders on and not see foreseeable consequences of projects.” He added that the ruling is “essentially saying that an administration that doesn’t believe in climate change is allowed to avoid talking about it entirely.”

Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, agreed, saying that “this disastrous decision to undermine our nation’s bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify, and people will be less healthy.”

Yet Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said the decision is “far from the worst-case scenario.”

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He said the ruling would still allow agencies to consider the downstream impacts of oil and gas leasing, such as the greenhouse gas emissions that would be generated by burning oil after it has been extracted.

As is customary for Supreme Court justices, Gorsuch did not offer a reason for his decision to recuse himself from the case. Liberal groups had highlighted his ties to billionaire Philip Anschutz, whose Anschutz Exploration Corp. has interests in the Uinta Basin. Anschutz was a client of Gorsuch’s law firm before Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court.

President Donald Trump used his first term to make sweeping changes to NEPA that he said would make it easier to build new projects. On Wednesday, the White House Council on Environmental Quality withdrew Biden-era guidance that directed federal agencies to consider projects’ contributions to climate change.

Today the Supreme Court decided Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which challenged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s capacious understanding of agency obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act. The justices unanimously rejected the D.C. Circuit’s approach, but split 5-3 over what the D.C. Circuit did wrong. Justice Kavanaugh wrote for the Court, joined by the Chief Justice and the Court’s conservative justices (other than Justice Gorsuch, who was recused). Justice Sotomayor wrote an opinion concurring in the judgment, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson.

At first read, the biggest significance of this opinion is that it clarifies that NEPA does not require Environmental Impact Statements to consider upstream and downstream effects of projects that are caused by third-parties. This is particularly significant for infrastructure projects, such as pipelines or transmission lines, and should help reduce NEPA’s burdens (at least at the margins). The opinion will also likely hamper any future efforts, perhaps by Democratic administrations, to expand or restore more fulsome (and burdensome) NEPA requirements.

Justice Kavanaugh’s introduction does a nice job of laying out the issues and the Court’s conclusions. Here it is:

Some 55 years ago, Congress passed and President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA. For certain infrastructure projects that are built, funded, or approved by the Federal Government, NEPA requires federal agencies to prepare an environmental impact statement, or EIS. The EIS must address the significant environmental effects of a proposed project and identify feasible alternatives that could mitigate those effects. NEPA was the first of several landmark environmental laws enacted by Congress in the 1970s. Subsequent statutes included the Clean Air Amendments of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973, among others. Unlike those later-enacted laws, however, NEPA imposes no substantive environmental obligations or restrictions. NEPA is a purely procedural statute that, as relevant here, simply requires an agency to prepare an EIS—in essence, a report. Importantly, NEPA does not require the agency to weigh environmental consequences in any particular way. Rather, an agency may weigh environmental consequences as the agency reasonably sees fit under its governing statute and any relevant substantive environmental laws. Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it. In this case, the U. S. Surface Transportation Board considered a proposal by a group of seven Utah counties for the construction and operation of an approximately 88-mile railroad line in northeastern Utah. Under federal law, the Board determines whether to approve construction of new railroad lines. The railroad line here would connect Utah’s oil-rich Uinta Basin—a rural territory roughly the size of the State of Maryland—to the national rail network. By doing so, the new railroad line would facilitate the transportation of crude oil from Utah to refineries in Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere. And the project would bring significant economic development and jobs to the isolated Uinta Basin by better connecting the Basin to the national economy. For that proposed 88-mile Utah railroad line, the Board prepared an extraordinarily lengthy EIS, spanning more than 3,600 pages of environmental analysis. The Board’s EIS addressed the environmental effects of the railroad line. But the U. S. Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit nonetheless faulted the EIS for not sufficiently considering the environmental effects of projects separate from the railroad line itself—primarily, the environmental effects that could ensue from (i) increased oil drilling upstream in the Uinta Basin and (ii) increased oil refining downstream along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas. On that basis, the D. C. Circuit vacated the Board’s EIS and the Board’s approval of the 88-mile railroad line. As a result, construction still has not begun even though the Board approved the project back in December 2021. We reverse. First, the D. C. Circuit did not afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases. Second, the D. C. Circuit ordered the Board to address the environmental effects of projects separate intime or place from the construction and operation of the railroad line. But NEPA requires agencies to focus on the environmental effects of the project at issue. Under NEPA, the Board’s EIS did not need to address the environmental effects of upstream oil drilling or downstream oil refining. Rather, it needed to address only the effects of the 88-milerailroad line. And the Board’s EIS did so.

Justice Sotomayor’s opinion concurring in the judgment reaches the same conclusion — the Surface Transportation Board was not obligated to consider environmental effects caused by third parties that could not influence its decision — but reached that conclusion by a different route. Her opinion begins:

The National Environmental Policy Act improves agency decisionmaking by requiring agencies to consider environmental impacts for which their decisions would be responsible. I agree with the Court that the Surface Transportation Board would not be responsible for the harms caused by the oil industry, even though the railway it approved would deliver oil to refineries and spur drilling in the Uinta Basin. I reach that conclusion because, under its organic statute, the Board had no authority to reject petitioners’ application on account of the harms third parties would cause with products transported on the proposed railway. The majority takes a different path, unnecessarily grounding its analysis largely in matters of policy. Accordingly, I write separately to explain why the result in this case follows inexorably from our precedent.

Note that with the issuance of this decision, the only opinion left from the December sitting (indeed, the only opinion left from a case argued in 2024) is Skrmetti, and the only justices who have not written an opinion from the December sitting are Justice Thomas and the Chief Justice (and they are also the only two conservative justices to have only written two majority opinions thus far this term). This makes me thing that the Chief Justice has that opinion, but we’ll see.