Linking recent oil and gas activity to the state’s largest earthquake, the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma has filed a lawsuit against the federal government, asking a judge to void recently approved drilling permits on tribal land and halt the issuance of new ones.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in Tulsa federal court, claims numerous drilling permits and leases on tribal-owned lands held in trust have been improperly approved by the Interior Department, Bureau of Indian Affairs and U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
“In doing so, BIA and BLM also have run roughshod over Pawnee natural resource protection laws, disregarded a tribal moratorium on new oil and gas approvals, and violated the agencies’ trust responsibilities to the Pawnee,” the lawsuit alleges in its complaint.
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The lawsuit was filed by the tribe’s Attorney General Don Mason on behalf of the tribe and Pawnee Nation member Walter R. Echo-Hawk in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma based in Tulsa.
Mason could not be reached for comment on the lawsuit.
The Pawnee Nation, with its tribal headquarters located in Pawnee, has approximately 3,200 members.
The lawsuit mentions the state record 5.8-magnitude earthquake that struck the morning of Sept. 3, about eight to nine miles northwest of Pawnee as evidence of the tribe’s “fears about hydraulic fracturing.”
The earthquake damaged structures in Pawnee, including, according the lawsuit, “many” of the Pawnee Nation’s administrative buildings. It also prompted the Oklahoma Corporation Commission to order 37 injection wells near the quake epicenter to shut down.
The approval of the challenged oil and gas drilling permits has occurred despite a tribal ban on new wells, the lawsuit states.
In October 2015, the tribe enacted a moratorium on leasing and fracturing approvals on Indian land in Payne and Pawnee counties.
The tribal resolution adopting the moratorium described hydraulic fracturing as a “new, vastly different, and highly destructive land use” posing threats of earthquakes, water pollution, and impacts to Indian water rights,” according to the lawsuit.
“The moratorium called for BIA and BLM to halt leasing and permitting until the agencies and the Nation can develop a policy to address these concerns.”
The lawsuit takes aim at hydraulic fracturing wastewater that is disposed via injection into underground wells and its effects.
“The subsurface pressures from that injected waste have caused a wave of disposal-induced earthquakes in northern Oklahoma,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also claims the federal government did not conduct a proper environmental impact analysis when it approved the diversion of water from the Cimarron River for drilling operations in the area.
The lawsuit describes Echo-Hawk as living on a Pawnee Indian allotment along the Cimarron River, downstream from leases challenged in the case.
Echo-Hawk is also a partial owner of two Indian allotments affected by oil and gas leases approved by the federal government that “threaten Mr. Echo-Hawk’s health and well-being, affect his enjoyment of his home, the river, and his community, and impact the value of his property,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit claims the BIA approved at least 17 oil and gas leases on Pawnee tribal allotments in 2013, all without going through proper environmental studies required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
“Because BIA failed to analyze the leases under NEPA, it never considered the reasonably foreseeable impacts of developing those leases, such as the effects of hydraulic fracturing and wastewater disposal,” according to the lawsuit.
In addition to violating the NEPA, the lawsuit claims the federal agencies have approved drilling permits that failed to follow the Administrative Procedures Act, American Indian Agricultural Resource Management Act of 1993, National Historic Preservation Act and an executive order regarding development in a floodplain.
